Dance of the Bones

C.H.: For sure by the middle of June. After that, I spent months drinking and got picked up for being drunk and disorderly. The judge ordered me into mandatory treatment. Once I got sober, I realized that since I couldn’t count on anyone else to save my sorry ass, I’d have to do the job myself. If my life was going to have any kind of happy ending, finding it was up to me.

Someone from AA helped me get into a shelter run by the YWCA. The -people there helped me find a job and start taking classes. First I got my GED and then I enrolled in college. I have my own studio apartment now, and I’m halfway through my junior year.

S.D.: What are you studying?

C.H.: I’m majoring in religious studies. After I graduate, I want to earn a degree in divinity. It’s one thing for -people in the suburbs to come swanning into some shelter during the holidays to serve turkey dinners and tell themselves that they’re doing their Chris-tian duty. I want to minister to the homeless because I’ve been homeless. I know what it’s like.

S.D.: Some -people might think you were operating with a guilty conscience.

C.H.: Those -people would be wrong.

S.D.: When Mr. Myers said he was leaving, he led you to believe that he was expecting to make a score of some kind? That he’d be coming back with enough money for the two of you to move out of the homeless camp?

C.H.: That’s right.

S.D.: Is it possible that he was involved in some kind of illegal activity?

C.H.: You mean like drug smuggling or something? No, Kenny drank, but he didn’t do drugs, and I never thought he was a crook.

S.D.: Let me ask you this, Ms. Horn: Did you kill Mr. Myers?

C.H.: No, absolutely not! I swear. Like I said before, I didn’t even know he was dead until just a little while ago when you told me. I always believed that he had taken off with another woman.

S.D.: Miss Horn, would you be willing to take a polygraph test?

C.H.: You mean a lie detector test? Of course. I’d do it in a heartbeat.

The interview ended there. And that’s when I realized I’d already seen a copy of the results from Calliope Horn’s polygraph test. It had been right there in the evidence box. The results indicated that Calliope Horn had known nothing about Kenneth Myers’s death. She had been telling the truth.

With those thoughts in mind, I went on to the other interviews. Calliope Horn’s wasn’t the only one that had been transcribed into what more or less passed for English. Between the time Myers disappeared and the time his remains were found, the encampment had been disbanded and most of the -people who had lived there had moved on to wherever homeless -people go when they have to go somewhere else. Only a few of the former residents had ever been identified, to say nothing of located.

Interviews with the few individuals who had been found, especially ones conducted by Kramer working alone, were easier for me to read than the ones with Sue’s name on them, but they shed little light on the matter beyond the fact that they all agreed Kenny had disappeared sometime in the spring of 1983. Calliope was the only one who had been able to supply an exact date.

Carl Jacobson, the person who had supposedly witnessed Ken Myers talking to the “ex--girlfriend” and who might have been able to give a description of her, was one of the MIAs. As a consequence, the closest individual to an eyewitness was never interviewed.

Turning off my iPad, I could see why the case had gone cold: No murder weapon. No witnesses. No time of death. No actual crime scene. It wasn’t until years later that Mel Soames, using dental records, had linked the Myers homicide up to an Arizona missing persons report on someone named Kenneth Mangum. That report had been filed years earlier by Ken’s mother, who was deceased by the time the cops came calling with the bad news that her son had been murdered decades earlier in Seattle.