Page 70 of Den of Iniquity

Thirty seconds later I was introducing myself to Harriet Bonham of Lexington, Kentucky, someone with a very interesting tale to tell. Once I got her on the phone and introduced myself, she was happy to share the story of the man who ended up becoming the celebrated black sheep of her family.

“William Landon was my mother’s favorite cousin,” she said. “I grew up hearing stories about him, about how Mom and Billy used to play together when they were kids—climbing trees, building forts, swimming in the lake on my grandfather’s farm. Mom was born in 1927. Billy was a year older. She always talked about how smart he was and how handsome. After his older brother Frank died in childhood, his folks expected that eventually Billy would step up and take over running the family farm, but he wasn’t interested in farming. He left home and joined the army as soon as he turned eighteen.”

“Just in time for the tail end of World War II?” I asked.

“He wasn’t overseas for all that long, but Mom said he was a different person when he came home, and they were never close again. He moved to Cincinnati, got married, and had a couple of kids. By the midfifties he was driving an armored car for Brinks. In 1956 there was a robbery. Three men were involved, and Billy was one of them. He took off before the cops figured out it was an inside job. The other two guys ended up going to prison. Billy vanished without a trace.”

“And got away with the money,” I suggested.

“How did you know that?”

“Lucky guess,” I said.

“How did you make the connection back to me?” Harriet wanted to know.

“We got a hit from unidentified DNA found at the scene of a crime,” I told her. Two separate ones, in fact, but there was no need to go into that.

“What kind of crime?” Harriet asked. “Billy was born in 1926. That would make him close to a hundred years old by now. How’s it even possible that he’s still going around committing crimes?”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “That information is a part of an ongoing police investigation, and I’m unable to comment at this time.”

There was a short silence between us before the reality dawned on her. “It must be one of his children then,” she surmised, “or maybe even one of his grandchildren. He abandoned a wife and kids when he left Ohio. She got a divorce and eventually remarried, and Billy must have done the same thing—starting over someplace else and ending up with a whole new family.”

That was my guess, too, but I didn’t say so. Instead I asked another question. “How much money did he make off with?”

“Four hundred thousand,” she said. “When I started doing research on my own, that’s what the newspaper articles said. I wasn’t even born when it happened, so everything I know about William Landon is secondhand. Every once in a while as a kid, I’d overhear my mother talking with one of her sisters or cousins about Billy, the black sheep of the family. Whenever I tried to ask my mother about him, though, she’d shut me down. It wasn’t until after Mom died that I started looking into what happened. That’s when I connected William Landon with her beloved Cousin Billy. Once I finally gotaround to googling William Landon’s name, that was the first link that turned up—one to a newspaper article about the Brinks robbery.”

She kept talking but for a time I wasn’t really paying attention, I was too busy thinking.Four hundred thousand dollars would have added up to a hell of a lot of hundred-dollar bills!

“And that got me to wondering,” Harriet was saying when I tuned back in on the conversation. “How did he manage to disappear so completely that the cops were never able to find him? Where did he go? What happened to him? Was he dead or alive?

“I watch a lot of true crime on TV,” she continued. “That’s where I heard about how long-forgotten cold cases are now being solved when relatives of a suspect post their DNA on ancestry databases. According to what I read, GEDmatch is one of the few of those that actually cooperates with law enforcement. That’s why I chose them. I wanted to find out what happened to him after he left Ohio.”

“Thank you for that,” I told her, and I meant it, too. “I can’t tell you how much you’ve helped us already. Apparently we’re dealing with far more than a single cold case—it’s actually several. Once those are solved, Ms. Bonham, I promise that I’ll get back to you with the whole story.”

“You will?”

“Mark my words.”

“And I helped? Really?”

“More than you know,” I replied.

With that I ended the call, but I didn’t put down the phone. Instead, I located my friend Ron Peters’s cell phone number and punched it. That 1956 armored car robbery had to be the source of the hundred-dollar bills that linked all five cases together, and that made me confident that I finally had enough information to compelSeattle PD to reopen those three mislabeled cases. I believed Ron Peters was the guy who could get the job done.

“Hey, Beau,” he said genially when he answered. “It’s been a while. How are things and what are you up to?”

“When you find out why I’m calling,” I told him, “you’re not going to be happy, because I’m about to become a real pain in your ass.”

“When haven’t you been a pain in my ass?” he replied with a laugh. “Tell me about it.”

So I did. Once I got off the phone with him, I called everybody else, too—Ben Weston and Sandy Sechrest at Seattle PD, Elizabeth Byrd in Liberty Lake, Boyce Miller in Kent, Yolanda Aguirre, and even Gretchen Walther from the crime lab. Once all hell broke loose on this, I wanted all of us to be on the same page.

Chapter 32

Bellingham, Washington

Saturday, March 7, 2020

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