Page 87 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
Joanna went on full alert. “Put her through,” she said.
“I’ve been off work all week with a family emergency,” June explained, “so I didn’t see the BOLO until today, but I may have a match for you. Lisa Daniels, age seven, disappeared from Seattle’s SeaFair Hydro Races in August of 1983. Her mother, Josie, was...let’s just say a bit of a wild thing. The father was never in the picture. Josie was attending the races with a new boyfriend when she lost track of her daughter. The girl was found hours later floating face down in Lake Washington. Initially she was thought to be a drowning victim, but an autopsy revealed her cause of death to be asphyxia due to manual strangulation.”
“What was missing?” Joanna asked.
“That’s what was so odd,” Detective Martin said. “She was found fully clothed, including both shoes, but one shoelace was missing.”
For Joanna Brady another piece of the puzzle snapped into place. Roper had used summer festivals or crowded activities of some kind—times when the parents might be preoccupied with something else—to snatch their children.
“I checked,” Detective Martin said. “Cochise County is in Arizona, and that’s a long way from Seattle. Do you have a possible connection?”
Knowing another of Stephen Roper’s white shoelaces now had a name, Joanna told the whole story.
“In other words, you have the guy in custody,” Detective Martin said, “but there’s no way to prove it.”
“There might be,” Joanna said. “Let me call you back.”
Leaving her desk, Joanna made her way to the jail where she asked for Stephen Roper to be brought to an interview room.
“Is this round two?” he asked once he was seated and cuffed to the table.
“Maybe,” she said. Once again, she read him his Miranda warning.
“Do we have to go through this every single time?”
“Yes, we do,” Joanna replied.
“What do you want to know now?”
“Did you ever snatch a little girl from the SeaFair Hydro Races in Seattle?”
“Sure,” he said. “That was sometime in the eighties. I called her Hydro Girl.”
Just like that, a second shoelace in the collection of Stephen Roper evidence bags had a name.
Joanna then proceeded to have Roper identify the Elko High School class ring taken from Janice Jensen and Jimmy Gibson’s glow-in-the-dark cross. As she was on her way out of the interview room, she turned back to Roper and said, “By the way. I ran into your so-called attorney. He was an arrogant asshole.”
“I noticed,” Roper replied. “He gave me all kinds of hell for talking to you, and when I told him he was fired, I thought he’d blow a gasket. He told me he’d be billing me for the cost of his private jetflight from LA to Sierra Vista. I told him good luck with that. He said he’d see me in court. I was still laughing when he walked out the door.”
Back in her office, Joanna called Detective Martin back to give her the news.
Detective Martin was astonished. “He admitted to it just like that?”
“Just like that,” Joanna repeated. “He promised me a full confession, and it seems as though he’s a man of his word as far as that is concerned. Is Lisa’s mother still alive?”
“No,” Detective Martin replied. “She died of a drug overdose in 1985, two years after Lisa’s death. Josie’s mother, Darlene, used to call periodically to ask if anything was happening on the case. The last call from her that’s noted in the file was in 2019. By then she was getting up there. I wouldn’t be surprised if Covid got her. But I’ll check to see if there are any other relatives.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said.
Her next returned call was to Gunnar Hanson, the chief of police in Cannon Beach, Oregon. He wasn’t in, either, but in Cannon Beach, once Joanna explained who she was and why she was calling, whoever answered the phone was happy to pass along the chief’s cell phone number.
When she called him, he immediately explained, “We’re a small jurisdiction, with only one unsolved homicide on our books. As soon as I saw your BOLO, I wondered if maybe there was a connection, so I dug up the file just in case. Calvin Dobbs, from Beaverton, was nine years old in 1982 when he snuck out of his Cannon Beach hotel room while his parents were taking a nap. When they woke up and found him gone, the only other thing that was missing was his brand-new Star Wars kite. Later that day, his wrecked kite was found in a dumpster close to the beach. We still have the kite stored in our evidence locker. As for Calvin’s body? It was found a few miles south of here two days later. His death was ruled a homicide—manual strangulation. So that all jibes with your BOLO. The problem is, you said something should be missing, and as far as we could tell, everything was there.”
“Tell me about the kite,” Joanna said.
“I took a look at it at the same time I retrieved the file,” Chief Hanson said. “It featured a picture of Yoda and had a bright yellow tail.”
Remembering the piece of yellow plastic ribbon in the evidence bag, Joanna said, “Can I call you back?”
