The Suppliant Stranger

Last year Elzie Hammons bagged two grouse in a wooded area just out side Issaqua, Wash., and so, on the opening day of the hunting season this month, he headed there again. Walking back to his Jeep after scouting the bushes, Hammons spotted what he thought was a human skull lying on the ground. Near by was a section of rib cage and part of an arm. When a passer by heard about the bones and insisted that they must be from an animal, Hammons returned with him for a second look. "On the way back we found the clump of long black hair," said Hammons later. "It looked fresh and shiny and was about two feet long."

Grisly Evidence. Early last week police confirmed what Hammons had immediately suspected: the bones were human. The hunter had apparently found the first concrete clues to the mysterious disappearance of seven young women from various parts of Washington State since last January. Searchers sent to the area amassed a grisly pile of evidence: two jawbones, two spinal columns, some vertebrae, two leg bones apparently from the same person, two leg bones from a different person and more swatches of hair. The bones were from at least three different bodies, and with the help of dental charts, experts brought in by the police concluded that the jaw bones belonged to two women who vanished on July 14 from crowded Lake Sammamish State Park, a scant two miles away.

One was Janice Ott, 23, who worked for King County Juvenile Court in nearby Seattle and was known as a very sympathetic person -- "the type that would take in stray dogs and cats," a sheriffs lieutenant put it. That attribute may have been fatal: Janice was last seen wheeling her bicycle to the Lake Sammamish parking lot, accompanied by a young man with his arm in a sling. After her disappearance, at least four women recalled that they had been approached that day by an affable stranger who called himself Ted and wore a sling on his arm. Ted asked each woman to help him put his sailboat on top of his car; one woman walked with him to his brown Volkswagen but backed away when she realized that there was no boat in sight. About three hours after Janice vanished, Denise Marie Naslund, 18, a dark-haired computer-programming student, left her sunbathing friends to go to a park restroom. She never returned.

A man with his arm in a cast turned up last April in Ellensburg, 107 miles southeast of Seattle. He asked two girls to help him carry some books to his car. Each refused his request to get in the car and start it. Susan Elaine Rancourt, 18, may have been less wary. A freshman from Anchorage, Alaska, she disappeared on April 17 from the campus of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg.

So far, no suppliant stranger has been reported near the scenes of four other disappearances, three of which involved students. Lynda Ann Healy, 21, a fourth-year psychology major at the University of Washington, vanished during the night of Jan. 31 from her basement bedroom in an old residence in Seattle's University District, leaving blood on her sheet and pillow. At Evergreen State College in Olympia, Freshman Donna Gail Manson, 19, headed across campus to a jazz concert on the evening of March 12, but never arrived. In the early hours of June 11, another University of Washington student, Georgann Hawkins, 18, disappeared from a busy, well-lighted alley near her sorority house. A 22-year-old girl named Brenda Ball vanished from a Seattle-area tavern on June 1.

Link Doubted. Because he spoke with a slight English accent and said that he had hurt his arm playing racquet ball, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been asked about Ted. Racquet ball is played in Seattle, but it is much more popular in adjacent British Columbia, which has been plagued by a series of unsolved rape-murders. "We've got a bloody sick one," said one R.C.M.P. sergeant, but another officer doubts that there is a link with the Washington mystery. "It seems to me the guy down there makes sure his victims aren't found. Ours just dumps them openly on old logging roads and such."

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