John Dwight Canaday was born about 1945. He was a Vietnam veteran, a recently divorced father of two, and worked as a pipeman's helper for the Seattle water department.
On December 17, 1968 Sandra Darlene Bowman, sixteen and pregnant, told her husband Thomas she was unwell and would stay in bed. She opened the door of their Ballard apartment to Canaday at random. He bound her hands behind her back, raped her, and stabbed her fifty-seven times. Thomas found her when he came home from the cannery. The killing caused enough public anger to raise a substantial reward fund, into which he put his own money, and he was himself ruled out on his alibi. Then the leads ran out.
The prosecution's account years later was that killing Bowman emboldened him, and that within weeks he killed, raped, assaulted, kidnapped or attempted to rape six other women.
On January 4, 1969 he knocked on Mary Annabelle Bjornson's door and said he had car trouble. She was twenty-one and had food on the stove for a friend who was coming to dinner. He drew a knife, tied her wrists with rope, drove her to a park, raped her and strangled her. Her friend arrived to find the dinner still cooking and nobody there.
Three weeks later he found Lynne Carol Tuski, twenty, walking to her car outside a department store in north Seattle, and approached her asking directions. He forced her into the car at knifepoint, tied her hands, took her to Golden Gardens Park, raped her and strangled her with the same rope. Both bodies were left near Index in Snohomish County, off the Index River Tract Road, and he burned both women's clothes in his parents' fireplace.
He was caught because a woman survived him. On February 22, 1969 he was arrested for kidnapping and assaulting a woman he had known at Leavenworth High School, whom he had held for close to three days; she was found alive at his parents' house with rope burns and bruises after a witness placed her with him shortly before she disappeared. It was while he was in custody on that charge that Tuski's body was found half buried in snow, and under questioning he admitted both killings and took police to where Bjornson lay.
He was convicted later that year and sentenced to hang. In 1972 the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, not on the merits of his case but because of the United States Supreme Court decision that struck down the death penalty in more than thirty states.
The Bowman case stayed open for thirty-six years. In 2004 Seattle detectives sent evidence preserved from her body to the state crime laboratory, which matched sperm recovered in 1968 to Canaday's profile; it was in the state database because of the 1969 convictions. A detective went to the penitentiary at Walla Walla and told him he had left his DNA at the scene. He sighed, held up his hands and said that yes, he had killed her.
He pleaded guilty on October 14, 2004. Judge Richard Jones described what he had done as torture, said the horror of the crimes was beyond words, and gave him a third life sentence to begin after the two he was already serving. The King County prosecutor's office called the Bowman killing the oldest cold case ever solved in Washington state, and he has been described as the earliest serial killer known in the state.
He died at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center on December 26, 2012.
Two points on the record. This archive carried him as James Canaday, and one wire report of 2004 does use James Dwight Canaday, but the Seattle papers, the court reporting and the reference accounts all give John Dwight Canaday; the entry keeps the old spelling in its address and uses the name the record uses. And Lynne Tuski is described as a University of Washington junior in the Seattle reporting and as a Washington State University student elsewhere.