![]() Peter, who has no other children, is a devoted father figure-working on cars with Billy, going to his soccer games, helping him with Scout projects. Maybe the more naive you are, the more protected, maybe the more danger you face.”Ī gentle youth with a sudden, blinding smile, Billy is the cherished only child of his mother and stepfather, Toni and Peter Mueller, who married when Billy was 6 years old. “I keep thinking when I was a kid, there was no way. “I’ve thought about what makes a kid go with a guy like that,” says Billy’s stepfather. Billy wasn’t even on the list,” says one of his teachers. “You thought of all the kids at school who might get in that situation. That Billy would be capable of such a deed seemed as preposterous as the notion that he would go home with this particular man to begin with. Twelve hours after leaving the Seattle Public Library that afternoon, with his notes for a high school research paper tucked in his book bag, he had killed 36-year-old Lajos Janko in what the police would say was the coldest of blood. he was in bed with a disturbed homosexual Hungarian Gypsy who liked to pick up teen-age boys. Billy was taking Communion at the Catholic church where he had built a shrine to the Virgin Mary as his Eagle Scout project at 11 p.m. As fast as a bad dream, everything goes terribly wrong.Īt 11 a.m. “Make good choices” is your mantra-though you’ve had precious few chances to make bad ones. You’re a good kid who always does the right things-you go to church, you respect your elders, you work hard in school. “The story to my parents,” Billy began, “is that I was in the library downtown all day.”īILLY HARRIS’ STORY COULD BE ANY CHILD’S NIGHTMARE. A homicide suspect’s first statement to the police will almost certainly be the last before the lawyers intervene, and Kuerschner wanted to get it all down. Billy wound up telling it twice: first, in a rush of words, and again, more slowly, with Kuerschner squatting beside his chair and writing as fast as he could. The boy’s name was William James Harris, age 17, known to his family and friends as “Billy,” and he was so anxious to explain what had happened that Kuerschner had to stop him to read him his Miranda rights. After radioing for medics and homicide investigators, Kuerschner sat the kid in a chair and tried to calm him down. It was an incongruous homicide scene: an obviously brutalized victim and a terrified killer, a slight, bespectacled kid so hysterical that his adolescent voice had soared to a falsetto. He pointed to a dark-haired man sprawled motionless on a daybed in the living room, his feet touching the floor, his head and torso covered with blood. ![]() Facing them across the threshold was no woman but a barefoot teen-age boy, fresh blood on his hands and toes. They were so loud they are audible on the tape of her 911 call.Ĭautiously, the officers unlocked the door. ![]() Though she couldn’t see anyone, she could tell that the screams were coming from the Olive Ridge Apartments across the alley. She opened her bedroom window to peer outside. She frequently heard cries in the dark a mental health clinic is a block away, and this is not a quiet family neighborhood. But they all heard the same desperate plea: “Help me! Please help me!”Īwake in her bed, a neighbor listened for a minute or two before dialing 911. Nor did the callers agree on whether it was a man or a woman. Exactly where the screams were coming from they could not say. In less than 10 minutes, the 911 emergency dispatcher received a dozen calls from alarmed residents in a three-block radius of 17th Avenue and East Howell. It is a howl of human anguish, almost too painful to hear.įrom a seventh-floor window of an apartment building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, the screams woke a sleeping neighborhood at 2:40 a.m. Though it speaks-shrieks-words, it is beyond language, too. Both shrill and guttural, the voice is beyond gender. THE VOICE IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE SEATTLE POLICE Department tape recording is garbled, but its message is not.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |