Womens’ deaths remain a mystery
SEATTLE – His wife and daughter were killed last summer on a remote hiking trail 70 miles from home, in the middle of the day, at the height of their lives, among mountains they had regarded as a sanctuary.
David Stodden doesn’t know who did it or why. He doesn’t know whether his wife and daughter were beaten, raped or mutilated; whether they fell quickly or fought to the end. He knows that each was shot in the head and left just off the trail where anybody could see them. He knows detectives have made no arrests, and hikers all over the region remain shaken.
“I don’t know where this is all going,” Stodden says, referring to the mystery that has enveloped his life. “I’m feeling my way through it.”
He is 58, with graying hair and mustache and a thin, angular face that is at once open and reserved. He smiles easily. When emotion rises, he pauses in mid-sentence and clenches his jaw until the moment passes, then resumes in the easy cordial way that friends describe as “just David.”
On this overcast day, nearly eight months after the killings, Stodden is about to trek into those same mountains, to get as close as possible to the spot on the Pinnacle Lake trail where the bodies were found. The purpose is practical: to check whether the reward posters he put up last fall are still in place. He had checked them every couple of weeks until the weather turned cold and snow covered the trail. He’s hoping some of the snow has melted. It gives him something more to do.
A contractor by trade, he has taken time off work to fix up the modest wood-frame house in North Seattle where he and his wife raised three daughters during 28 years of marriage. “It’s still hard,” he says, referring to being in the house. “It’s getting better but still hard.”
Stodden strides through his yard carrying a stack of posters under his arm. The posters show a photo of Mary Cooper, 56, and Susanna Stodden, 27, on a hike two years earlier. Mother, fit and sturdy with curly red hair, stands almost a head taller than her dark-haired daughter whose youthful face could belong on a teenager. Each wears a distinctive smile: Mary’s exuberant, Susanna’s slightly shy.
Mary, an elementary school librarian, loved books and children and managed to craft a life surrounded by both. Teary students put up a cardboard sign at the school’s front entrance that read “Mary in the library – the nicest person in the universe.”
Susanna was the oldest daughter. She was a month away from a teaching internship at a private school and was excited she could commute from her apartment to the school on bicycle. She had adopted a lifestyle based on simplicity and enjoyed nothing more than spending time in wilderness.
Stodden carefully places the posters in the back seat of a dark purple Dodge Caravan. He climbs in. “Mary’s van,” he says simply. The same one she and Susanna rode in their last morning, July 11, a typical summer day in the Northwest. It began mostly sunny and ended mostly cloudy, not unlike this day. Stodden follows the same route.
Mary had been in a happy mood that morning, he recalls. She and Susanna were close, sharing passions for music and nature, but their schedules didn’t allow them to go hiking together very often. Mother and daughter wanted to hike at least once before Susanna started her job.
The plan was a day hike to Mt. Pilchuck, a 5,324-foot peak with a panoramic view of the Cascades, Olympics and Puget Sound.
Before Stodden left for work at 7:30, he told Mary to be careful – there still could be snow on the mountain – but he wasn’t overly worried. The family had hiked or camped in the region dozens of times. Stodden had carried a young Susanna on his shoulders through countless trails in these mountains.
Stodden, who says he spent the day working on a house on the west side of Green Lake, says he became a little concerned when he got home about 5:30 p.m. and Mary had not returned.
As planned, Stodden went on a bicycle ride with a friend to Seward Park. During the ride, and just after, Stodden repeatedly called Mary’s and Susanna’s cell phones – no answer. He told his cycling friend he was worried.
Shortly after he returned home at about 8:45 p.m., he began calling authorities. They told him nothing. At about 10 p.m. he was about to jump into his pickup when detectives pulled up.
They said Mary and Susanna were found dead on a trail leading to Pinnacle Lake, which was southeast of Pilchuck. All day, Stodden recalls, he thought they were hiking Pilchuck. Had he gone searching, he would have gone up the wrong trail.
The detectives told him it might have been an animal attack – bear or cougar. The wounds were not immediately identifiable.
Investigators soon after confirmed the women died of gunshots but would not say how many shots, what caliber weapon, what part of the head and whether the shots were point-blank or long-range. The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, the agency in charge of the investigation, has refused to disclose, or even confirm, other details.
In January, Stodden took a lie-detector test at the sheriff’s request. The result came back inconclusive. The test, measuring physiological responses to pointed questions, can be thrown off by stress or illness, and Stodden says he was fighting a cold that day. He took a second test but has not been informed of the result. “I’ve nothing to hide,” he says.
Stodden’s surviving daughters – Joanna, 22, and Elisa, 24 – have declined interviews. He says they are frustrated by the lack of discernible progress in the investigation. Stodden, who at first met with detectives weekly, now meets with them once or twice a month. He too has begun showing signs of impatience.
“I understand the frustration,” sheriff’s spokeswoman Rebecca Hover said. “Because we don’t have new information to release doesn’t mean we’re not working on it. We definitely are.”
If online discussion groups are an indication, more hikers – especially women – are taking precautions, from packing guns to traveling in numbers. Kim Brown, a Seattle woman who backpacks solo, says the slayings indeed “felt like an invasion of evil” but adds: “I don’t want to be hysterical.” As Stodden pulls the van onto an unmarked Forest Service road that leads to the trailhead, signs of gunfire lay scattered throughout the road. He parks and gets out into the snow. Within minutes, he spots a batch of bullet casings. He gestures at the ground, where a couple dozen casings – from a 9-millimeter gun – lay in the snow next to a crumpled cigarette butt.
Target shooting and hunting are legal in national forests. Farther up, Stodden finds .40- and .45-caliber casings and shotgun shells of various gauges strewn among empty beer cans.
Last fall, he had put up a reward poster at the trailhead and returned weeks later to find bullet holes over Mary and Susanna’s faces. Their photo had been used as a bull’s-eye. He replaced the poster. He realizes now he won’t be able to check that poster today. He trudges back down the road to the van.
Driving back through Granite Falls, Stodden spontaneously turns onto a side street and parks in front of a small blocky building, the Granite Falls Police Department. Inside, Officer Rich Michelsen works the front counter. Stodden hands him a poster. “Have you heard anything?” he says.
The officer shakes his head. “County’s not telling us a thing,” Michelsen says. “But we got people out there listening. If there’s anybody talking, we’ll hear about it. OK?”