I was just a couple of week into my new job as a Whidbey News-Times reporter in 1997 when I heard that a 7-year-old girl named Deborah Palmer had disappeared on her way to school. Newspaper photographer Jim Davidson and I someone stumbled out way into her mother’s apartment that afternoon. It was a scene I will never forget. I was extremely uncomfortable and didn’t know what to do or ask. Madeline Palmer was nearly hysterical. Her cute little son didn’t know what was going on, but was excited by all the activities and climbed all over his mother. A number of family members and friends were gathered around, speaking in hushed voices.
The News-Times staff rushed to put out a special section on Deborah’s disappearance. Five days later, Oak Harbor was crawling with TV news vans as word spread that someone had found the little girl’s body on a beach. Some days later, I attended Deborah’s open casket funeral and a large community memorial service in a gymnasium. It was the kind of events that make a big impact on a young reporter.
But not a lot happened after that, at least from my perspective. There were a few false alarms over the years, but nobody was ever fingered for the terrible crime. I wrote dozens of stories saying that the investigation was stymied and that the police need the public’s help. About six months after the murder, the former police chief told the News-Times and a number of other newspapers that he was irritated that many people in the community seemed to have forgotten what had happened.
I’m not sure there was apathy about the crime in Oak Harbor. I think many people were genuinely haunted by the crime. But it also seems that a lot of people made assumptions about what happened and they think they know who killed the little girl. Rumors still circulate around the city. We’ve received many letters over the years that cast blame for the crime. Some people think the police bumbled the case since the answer is so obvious.
Without repeating the rumors, let me point out a few facts: The coroner said Deborah Palmer probably didn’t die the same day she went missing. Her family didn’t own a car. Her body was found on a remote beach many miles away. The police have looked into the rumors that connect the murder with a drug deal. The police are looking at touch DNA technology, which probably would only be successful if a stranger was identified.
Now that Detective Teri Gardner has restarted the case, I’ve been combing my old crime stories, looking for anyone who seems capable of killing a little girl. Looking back over the last 13 years, it’s shocking how many people in little ol’ Oak Harbor have been prosecuted for crimes against children. There’s even cases in which men victimized grade-school girls of Filipino descent. One of the most horrific cases of child pornography occurred in an Oak Harbor trailer park. James and Tracey Wright create their own child pornography with their own children, including an infant, as well as other people’s kids. The FBI found photos on their computer of James Wright raping his baby. They even invited a friend from Everett to molest their children. They shared the images on the Internet. They were all convicted of child-porn charges in federal court. James Wright was sentenced to just 15 years in prison, which he unsuccessfully appealed. The details of the court case are at http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F3/373/935/474208.
The point, I think, is that the list of possible scenarios and suspects is immense and nobody should assume they know what goes on behind closed doors, even in a place like Whidbey Island.

During the recent budget cuts in Island County, some people started a debate over how dangerous police work really is. It was obviously an issue on people’s minds with the series of murders of police officers in the state. Island County Sheriff Mark Brown argued that deputies were essentially more important than other county employees because they are “risk takers.” On the other hand, a couple of people associated with the WSU Extension Office claimed that it’s not really such a dangerous job, especially in a rural county.
So I looked up the numbers. I looked back at the famous list of the 10 Most Dangerous Jobs in America, which is based on numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the last decade, I only saw police officers on the list once, at No. 10 in 2007. In most years, police work is considered the 11th or 12th most dangerous job in America, statistically speaking.
Another significant statistic is a nationwide number that looks at the relative risk of fatality for different jobs, also created by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number for police includes patrol officers, detectives and supervisors in the calculation, which would skew it a little to the safe side. The relative risk index for police hovers around 3.4, which means that an officer is 3.4 times likelier to be killed than an average worker. Not surprising, the most common causes of on-the-job deaths for police officers are homicide and car crashes.
Obviously, carrying a badge has an inherent risk. But it’s not the most dangerous job in the county. As anyone who watches cable TV can guess, fishing and logging are the two most dangerous jobs in 2009, followed by aircraft pilots, steel and iron workers and farmers. At No. 6 is garbage and recyclable material collectors and handlers. In fact, a garbage collector injured at the county’s transfer station has filed a lawsuit. Are the folks in the solid waste department risk takers too?
Of course, statistics don’t tell the entire story. In my mind, we should give quality police officers, firefighters and paramedics strong support and good wages, not just because of the physical danger they face, but for the emotional and mental risk. Even in the safest of communities, unspeakable tragedies occur and those men and women have to deal with them head-on. I talked to a deputy years ago who held a little Camano Island girl as she died, the victim of a drugged-up teenager who beat her with a piece of firewood and raped her. How do cops recover from something like that? Last year, a boy shot himself in front of deputies after making a heartbreaking 911 call. I heard the call and it was more than I can handle. Detectives have to deal with a steady stream of children who have been abused by those who are supposed to care for them. It has to be numbing.

It’s not a good time to be a cop killer seeking mercy or understanding in Washington state courts. But Darrin Hutchinson is at it again; he recently filed a motion in Island County Superior Court to have his conviction and sentence vacated. Needless to say, his chances are slim.
Hutchinson shot and killed Island County deputies William Heffernan and John Saxerud in the breathalyzer room of the Island County jail in Coupeville following a DUI arrest Nov. 14, 1987. He took a key from Saxerud’s pocket, stole a patrol car and abandoned it in a ravine. He was arrested at his parent’s house a short time later. Hutchinson, a South Whidbey resident, was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
It may seem like a cut-and-dried case, but Hutchinson has a long and complicated history in the appeals and supreme courts. At one point, an appeals court overturned his conviction, though the state Supreme Court later reversed that decision and upheld the conviction. Hutchinson exhausted appeals to the state appeals court, the state Supreme Court, the U.S Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court. But that apparently doesn’t stop him from filing motions on his own, using a prison typewriter and a pen.
The motion Hutchinson filed in court Jan. 7 offers a sad glimpse into the mind of someone capable of gunning down two deputies in cold blood. In court papers, he claims that the conviction should be vacated because the judge in the original trial had raped his sister years before. He claims diplomatic immunity because President Wilson gave his great grandfather, the Russian Czar Nicholas II, safe haven under the secret Russian Royal Family Protection Clause. And he writes that there was a conspiracy against him and that the detectives destroyed the victims’ bodies.
Hutchinson also believed in aliens and shared a sketch he made of a man from outer space with a former South Whidbey Record reporter who interviewed him in prison. At his murder trial, Hutchinson claimed he acted in self defense against abusive cops and he put up a diminished capacity defense. I’m not sure that “diminished capacity” in the right term.

My interest was piqued when I heard that police were investigating the possibility of a homeless man sleeping overnight in the abandoned, creepy upstairs area of the newspaper office. Staff members had seen and heard a number of odd things over the last month, culminating in the sound of someone walking around and a pair of sandals found by an upstairs door.
The old newspaper building, which also housed the printing press when I first arrived, is sort of an eerie place at night. Especially when the wind is blowing and it howls through vents. That’s probably where the rumors that the building is haunted started. When I first got here, an oldtimer warned me about an apparition, though it always seemed like an odd place for a ghost. It’s sort of a boring place unless you enjoy cynical jokes and the smell of newsprint and stale coffee.
I don’t believe in ghosts, not even a little, but it’s oddly fun to write about those translucent intruders, as well as aliens and inexplicable events. I’ve written a dozen stories about ghosts and haunted places on Whidbey, from child ghosts in a one-room school house on Penn Cove to a haunted house that mysteriously burned down in Coupeville. Not to mention the aliens that were cutting cats in half or the crop circles that sprouted up in Coupeville. I heard a rumor about Penny, the Penn Cove monster, but I never could find a witness.
Whidbey residents: Do you have a ghost or a homeless guy living in your attic? Are you a witch or a warlock? Is you dog a serial killer? Drop me a line at jstensland@whidbeynewstimes.com.

The purpose of this weblog, I think, is to provide a candid look into crime and the law and justice community on Whidbey Island, as well as the hijinks of the modest newsroom that covers these things.
One of the weirder stories I’ve covered was about a drunk guy who stole a dump truck, kidnapped a dog, took his pants off and crashed into another vehicle. His excuse for his behavior was that he was raped at McDonald’s, though he later recanted the story. Unfortunately, someone got hurt in the collision, which takes a lot of the fun out of a story.
It’s the odd details that make such stories interesting to me. The small population of Whidbey Island means there’s not a lot of juicy, high-profile stories to dig into. There hasn’t been a murder in Oak Harbor for five years. Stories about bank robberies, terrorism and bestiality are hard to come by.
Nevertheless, there’s more than enough to keep me interested. I write extensively about the kinds of crimes that other newspapers may not always cover, but they are the misdeeds that affect people the most and tell us the most about a community, both in what criminals are up to and how the law responds.
Just about all the crime stories I’ve ever written in the last 12 years are saved on my computer. Randomly clicking on the list brings up a story about about a man who was arrested for using meth after he pulled his hair out and told a deputy he was “allergic to isotopes.” A woman stabbed her boyfriend in the butt; a man burglarized a home for bananas and junk food. There’s a story about a man who was arrested for growing marijuana after his brother finked on him. There’s one about a judge ordering “no biting” as a condition of a suspect’s release after the man bit a jailer on the calf. And there’s one about a bouncer who was charged with assaulting a patron, but the trial was put on hold after the alleged victim beat up the bouncer.
I relish the quirky details that I ferret out of police reports. In fact, I love oddball stories of all kinds, whether it’s the Iraq vet who hunts for ghosts or a guy who makes a living impersonating Saddam Hussein. I still kick myself because I didn’t do a story about a mixed-up hen that crowed like a rooster.
Sadly, a large portion of the stories on my hard drive involve terrible acts of violence, from a handful of murders to the sad, perverted march of child molesters through the court system. While crime rates continue to drop, the number of sex crimes against children hasn’t seemed to wane.