least 24 hours before her body was discovered.
Seattle Police Detective Keith Stuckly, on a special task force for homicide investigation, said: “Ms. Milford’s death has all the earmarks of another Mama’s Boy killing. The circumstances of her disappearance and death all but confirm it.”
The elusive serial killer dubbed “Mama’s Boy” is believed to be responsible for at least three other Seattle-area murders in the last eight months. Each victim was abducted in front of her son and later found beaten and strangled to death.
Milford was last seen with her only child, a 10-month-old boy, around 6 p.m. Wednesday in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park, four blocks from her home….
The article went on to explain about the three others before Andy’s mother.
On November 8, 1997, an intruder attacked the first victim, Sarah Edgecombe, twenty-four, in her home in Auburn while she was giving her three-year-old son a bath. Her husband, Kyle, had stepped out for cigarettes. Returning home twenty minutes later, he discovered the traumatized young boy, shivering in the cold tub. In the boy’s bedroom, on his pillow, Kyle found a dilapidated teddy bear. Hikers spotted Sarah’s remains three days later in the woods at Seattle’s Discovery Park. Unfortunately, woodland scavengers had found her first. Police had to scour nearly a mile of the forest before they found all of her, and even then, it was mostly bones, picked near-clean. Sarah was the only one who had been dismembered.
After that, it seemed Mama’s Boy wanted his victims to be discovered—eventually.
Anita Breckinridge, forty-three, disappeared on December 29, 1997, in a Safeway supermarket two miles from her Lynnwood home, leaving her four-year-old son in the shopping cart’s child seat. The abandoned boy’s screams resonated through the store for ten minutes. In the cart, a store employee found an old Raggedy Andy doll. The boy’s father confirmed that it didn’t belong to his son. The following morning, a jogger noticed Anita’s nude corpse in a ditch near the Burke-Gilman Trail by Lake Union in Seattle. The jogger called 911 from her cell phone. “For a moment, when I saw that pale thing lying there in the gully, I thought it was a dead deer,” she said.
With his learner’s permit in his back pocket, fifteen-year-old Greg Sherwood drove his mother, Lila, forty-nine, to China Gardens in Ballard on March 22, 1998. It was raining that night. Greg parked in an alley behind the restaurant. He left the motor running and his mother in the front seat while he dashed into the restaurant to pick up their carryout order. Greg returned five minutes later with two bags of Chinese food. He found the car’s passenger door open, and the windshield wipers still moving and squeaking. One of his mother’s shoes was in a puddle by that door. In the passenger seat was an old G.I. Joe doll. Lila Sherwood’s body was discovered in a Dumpster behind a Texaco station in Issaquah the following morning.
The toys Mama’s Boy left behind were all used, slightly damaged, and untraceable.
Psychologists on the case speculated that the killer’s mother must have deserted him, and there was probably abuse, too. It would explain why this killer was acting out. Typically, they would have expected all of the victims’ children to have been the same specific age—the age the killer might have been when abandoned by his mother, or when he might have experienced a severe trauma.
But that just didn’t apply to Mama’s Boy—and his killing pattern. The oldest surviving child was fifteen, and the youngest, Andy Milford, was ten months old.
No one saw the man who had abducted Andy’s mother in the park that night.
A twenty-seven-year-old construction worker, Chad Schlund, was the one who had found her. The building site was for a proposed forty-unit luxury condominium, Greenlake Manor. A two-story-deep, giant hole had been excavated for the basement and underground garage. A black tarp covered most of the vast crater, and that was where Chad Schlund wandered off from his coworkers to have a cigarette break. The ground beneath the tarp was hard and flat. So when Chad stepped on something soft and mushy beneath the black plastic sheeting, he balked. He noticed a bulky lump in the tarp and figured a large raccoon or dog must have made its way under that plastic sheet and suffocated.
Chad almost moved on. He had only a few minutes left of his break. Already one of the tall cranes began to sweep across the grey horizon again, and his coworkers were lumbering back to their workstations. Chad figured he had time for only half a cigarette now. Yet he stopped, and with his foot, pushed back the loose piece of tarp. He stopped when he saw the woman’s hand sticking out from under the tarp’s folds. The skin was so pale, it was almost blue. And her fingernails were the color of cinnamon.
The Seattle Times article on April 5, 1998, included a photo of Mama’s Boy’s fourth victim. The picture of Pamela Milford showed a pretty, fresh-faced woman with a big smile. Andy’s mother looked so full of hope. The picture had been taken around the time Pamela found out she was pregnant—back when her hair was still long.
CHAPTER TWO
Mount Vernon, Washington—ten years later
No Signal, it said in the window on her cell phone. This was the second time she’d tried calling him.
Susan Blanchette shoved the phone back in her purse, then sipped her Diet Coke. She smiled at her toddler son in the booster seat across from her. “You’ve had enough French fries, Mattie,” she said gently. “I want you to work on your Arby’s Junior. Just a few bites and you’ll make your dear old mother very happy.”
Mattie dared to eat one last fry; then he adjusted the napkin tucked in the collar of his Huskies sweatshirt. He was a bit short and underweight for his age, but healthy—with pink cheeks, straight, light brown hair, and long-lashed blue eyes. Cautiously touching the top bun of his junior roast beef sandwich as if it were the shell of a snapping turtle, he frowned at her. It was a perturbed expression Susan used to see on his father from time to time. Now she only saw that look on Mattie.
It was 1:45. The drive up from Seattle had taken an hour, and Susan guessed they had another hour to go before reaching Cullen, a sleepy little resort town, where her fiancé had rented them a house on Skagit Bay. Allen was there right now—or at least he was supposed to be. Susan just wished she could get ahold of him.
She hoped Mattie might sleep the rest of the way in the car, after their late lunch. The Arby’s—by a casino off Interstate 5 near the Mount Vernon exit—wasn’t too crowded. She and Mattie took a table in the middle of the restaurant, one of those two-seaters attached to another two-seater. The Formica table and plastic chairs were the color of mustard.
Mattie still hadn’t taken a bite out of his Arby’s Junior. He held it in his hand, but paid more attention to the Woody doll in his other hand. He was skipping Woody across the adjoining tabletop. The slim cowboy doll from Toy Story had belonged to Mattie’s older brother and was becoming something like a security blanket for Mattie lately. For months now, the cartoon cowboy doll had never left his side, and it was starting to smell.
In a nearby booth, three guys in their early twenties had been leering at her—to the point at which it had almost become more irritating than flattering. But they looked as if they were about to leave, thank God.
Susan was tall and pretty and often passed for twenty-five. But she’d just checked herself in her compact mirror—between attempts to phone Allen—and under the restaurant’s glaring fluorescent lights, Susan thought she appeared tired, haggard, and every one of her thirty-four years. That table full of twentysomething guys must have been really hard up. She didn’t exactly look glamorous in her knock-around black V-neck pullover and jeans—even if the ensemble accentuated
