duo became a trio.
Shortly after Helen returned home from the hospital, a woman from the Red Cross paid a visit to the new mother, offering chatty, warm, advice and a layette, a starter kit for a new baby including diapers, blankets, and some clothing. Someone at the hospital had noticed that Helen did not have any supplies for her newborn. Uncle Si had polished up the wooden cradle that he had constructed years ago for Helen to sleep in when she first came to live with him. Carefully, Helen gently placed her baby Judith in the same cradle. A second baby girl began life in Uncle Si’s hand-crafted cradle.
Uncle Si and Helen silently stared down at the new miracle, watching her sleep, each fast-forwarding in their mind’s eye to the infant’s life ahead, wondering what kind of person she would become. Would she look like her mother or her father? Would Uncle Si live long enough to see her graduate from school? Marry? Neither Uncle Si nor Helen had a whisper of a premonition that little Judith would grow up and marry a notorious, dangerous, serial killer.
Just one day short of Judith’s first birthday, the Japanese surrendered to allies on August 14, 1945, ending World War II. Wesley Mawson came home shortly thereafter with his U.S. Army combat engineers battalion, based in Fort Lewis, Washington. He met his one-year-old daughter, instantly recognizing his eyes and nose on her little face. He asked her mother to marry him.
Having been raised a Mormon Wesley Mawson married Helen in a Latter-day Saints Ward in Seattle, Washington, about one hundred miles north of Vader. He and his new family began a life together, staying with Uncle Si. Wesley quickly found work in the booming logging industry very close to home. But Wesley, feeling restless and hungry for more excitement, grew weary of the mundane logging job in the first year of employment. Like so many other returning soldiers, he may have been having difficulty transitioning into normal life after fighting in the war. One day in 1946, Wesley abruptly packed up his family and moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, leaving Uncle Si behind. Judith was a two-year-old toddler. The young family lived with Wesley’s parents, and Wesley went to work in a cement block yard. Helen began to observe the Mormon ways of life.
Again, Wesley did not bond with the colorless work routine, so he moved his family back to Vader, Washington. Again, they lived with Uncle Si. Wesley worked off and on at different jobs and began a new pattern of behavior that afforded less and less time with his wife and daughter. It seemed to Helen that her husband was always away, searching for something. Helen confided in Uncle Si that she felt like she had an exciting lover to meet occasionally for dates but not a husband. Uncle Si was not pleased with what he saw in Wesley’s behavior. Wesley had developed a reputation as being a highly excitable Tomcat, always on the prowl for mates. No, Uncle Si’s women deserved better.
In 1949 Helen’s father moved from California to Kennydale, Washington, and he invited Helen and little Judith to live with him. Helen agreed. She thought it was time to leave Vader, try something new. By now Helen’s husband had severed all contact with her.
Helen’s father, according to gossip, was doing well financially. Maybe he could help Helen with Judith’s upbringing and offer her opportunities that were not available in Vader. Uncle Si, she reasoned, was getting on in age and perhaps it was time to bless him with some well-deserved quiet in the home.
Judith’s first memories of her life originate in her grandfather’s home, a new rambler, in Kennydale, a suburb of Seattle. Even at Judith’s young age, she understood the significance of living in the first home on the block with a television set. She sat, motionless, enthralled, watching her favorite shows in black and white: Wanda Wanda and Howdy Doody.
Five-year-old Judith entered kindergarten and her mother got a job, again with Boeing, at the Renton plant where she hand-painted numbers on airplanes.
Life was good for Judith in grandfather’s house. They enjoyed modern appliances and indoor plumbing. Grandfather’s new wife prepared hearty meals of store-bought food. Frequently they shared meals with interesting guests seated all around the table. The adults showered affection upon the only child in the group, little Judith, in an attempt to fill in for her absent father. The adults indulged little Judith by laughing at her antics and listening intently whenever she interrupted the adults.
Grandfather owned a beautiful, shiny, black car. Judith and her mother enjoyed a fantastic new sense of freedom and great fortune as they traveled about the busy Seattle area by car, always driven safely by grandfather.
In 1950 Helen had saved enough money from her earnings to make a down payment and purchase a small home in Renton, very near the Boeing plant at which she worked. She could walk to work and save bus fare. Home ownership for a single, young woman in the 1950’s was unusual. However, Helen was determined to forge ahead and do whatever necessary to secure a sense of stability for herself and Judith. Helen and Judith left grandfather in Kennydale and moved into their new home. For a brief time, mother and daughter lived alone together, without any men. Helen worked a full schedule at Boeing, managed all of the household chores, cared for Judith, and tended a small garden in the back yard. Naturally, she grew potatoes like she had at Uncle Si’s place. Evening entertainment for the two was curling up together on the sofa, in pajamas, watching television and munching on bite-size pieces of raw potato.
With no other people in the house, Judith began to receive undiluted attention from her mother. “No” was not a word that Judith recognized. Helen dropped what she was doing to play with Judith, giving in to her demands. Judith had no rules to abide by in the home. She could freely jump on the furniture, spill food on the floor, and get into her mother’s things with no consequences. In a generation when “spare the rod, spoil the child” was advocated as good parenting wisdom, Helen chose to throw out the rod.
In June of l950 President Harry Truman authorized General Douglas MacArthur to send U.S. military support to South Korea. The Korean War had begun. Wesley Mawson re-enlisted as soon as he heard the news. He was going to be a soldier again.
On September 2nd of the same year, Sgt.Wesley Mawson stepped on a land mine near Seoul, Korea. His body was decimated, leaving scant remains to send home to his parents in Utah. Judith would not know until she was a sixty-one-year-old woman, while doing a genealogy search on the internet, that her grandfather, Wesley’s father, desperate to end the sickening grief he had felt after losing his son, walked out to the barn behind his house in Utah and fatally shot himself in the head on the two-year anniversary of Wesley’s death.
Judith became a six-year-old fatherless child and Helen a 24-year-old widow. Immediately, without contemplation, Uncle Si decided it was time to sell his home and land in Vader and, shortly thereafter, he moved in with Helen and Judith in the little home in Renton.
Judith seemed upset when she was told that her father had been killed in the war, but having only interacted with him for about six months out of her six years of life, she did not have any memories of her father that she could cling to. Helen gave Judith a wallet size, black and white, head and shoulders photo of Wesley—the only tangible evidence to Judith that she had ever had a father. She only knew that she had suffered some kind of loss and that her mother seemed to be sad. The mutual loss worked to reinforce the bond between mother and daughter.
When Uncle Si moved in, Helen transferred Judith out of her small bedroom and into Helen’s bedroom to allow Uncle Si his own room. Judith and Helen had to walk through Uncle Si’s bedroom, however, to access the tiny bathroom. Quarters were close but they moved around each other with respect for one another’s privacy.
The trio was together again.
In 1952, when Judith was eight years old, a group of boys from the neighborhood coaxed her into the little playhouse that had lived up to its name thus far—a cute little house that Judith played in. The playhouse was only steps from the house in her back yard. Having successfully isolated Judith from view of
