John Dwight Canaday was convicted of murdering three young women in Seattle over little more than five weeks in the winter of 1968 and 1969. Two of the killings, of Mary Annabelle Bjornson and Lynne Carol Tuski in January 1969, were solved within weeks, after he was arrested in an unrelated abduction. A King County jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death, and the Washington Supreme Court upheld the verdict in 1971. A ruling of the United States Supreme Court in 1972 spared his life.
The first killing waited much longer. Sandra Bowman, 16, pregnant and newly married, was stabbed to death in her home in the Ballard neighborhood on December 17, 1968. The case went unsolved for more than three decades, until a Seattle cold-case team matched DNA evidence from 1968 to Canaday's profile in the state database. Confronted in prison in 2004, he admitted the killing and pleaded guilty. The King County prosecutor's office called it the oldest cold case ever solved in Washington state. Canaday died in prison in December 2012.
Little was reported about Canaday's early years. When he stood trial in the summer of 1969, according to the Washington Supreme Court, he was 24 years old, a high school graduate and an honorably discharged Navy veteran. He was divorced and the father of two children. He had worked for the Seattle Water Department, and the Associated Press later reported that in 1968 he worked there as an assistant to a pipeman. At the time of his arrest he was living with his parents in Seattle. He drove a white Chevrolet station wagon about a year old and described himself as a skier.
Decades later, speaking to detectives, he linked his crimes to the end of his marriage. In a June 2004 interview, as the Associated Press summarized the charging papers, he blamed a bitter divorce and spoke of "a lot of anger at myself and immaturity."
Sandra Bowman was 16 and had been married for only a short time. She lived with her husband in an apartment in Ballard, in north Seattle, and she was expecting their first child. According to court documents described by the Associated Press, she was in her second trimester.
Seattle police later published a note she left for her husband that day, a glimpse of an ordinary household. "I went shopping today," she wrote. "I have $2.40 left over. The baby is kicking, I'm sure it's a boy. Love you, Sandy."
Her husband worked a late shift at a factory. On December 17, 1968, he came home from work and found her dead. She had been stabbed to death. Court documents filed in 2004 put the date and the cause of death on the record.
Her husband was suspected at first, as Seattle police later acknowledged, and he was eventually cleared. No one was charged. The file stayed open for 36 years.
Canaday was 24 at the time and working for the city water department in Ballard, according to the Associated Press and the Peninsula Daily News. He later told detectives that he had chosen her at random, according to the charging papers as reported by the Associated Press.
King County Deputy Prosecutor Timothy Bradshaw wrote in the 2004 court papers that the killing "evidently emboldened" Canaday to attack other women. Within weeks there were more attacks, and two more women died.
Mary Annabelle Bjornson was 21 and lived in an apartment in Seattle's University District. On the evening of January 4, 1969, at about 8 p.m., she stopped in at a neighbor's apartment and said she was going out for the evening. She told the neighbor that a stranger had come asking about another man in the building and had said he would come back. A small drawing found later on her kitchen table, which the neighbor identified as hers, was admitted at trial.
The man she was expecting that evening arrived at about 9:05 p.m. and found no one at home. She was not seen alive again. Her disappearance remained unsolved for more than two months.
He later confessed to killing her. She had been strangled. In 1969 he was convicted of her murder, with attempted rape.
Lynne Carol Tuski was 20. On January 25, 1969, three weeks after Mary Bjornson vanished, she too disappeared in north Seattle, according to the Associated Press.
He was later convicted of raping and murdering her. Her body was found on March 13, 1969, near Index, a small town in Snohomish County. She had been strangled. The discovery of her body led, within days, to the solving of both January cases.
Between the two killings, on January 23, 1969, Canaday attacked another young woman. He was charged over that attack in a justice court complaint filed on March 1, 1969. On May 5, 1969, he pleaded guilty to the most serious count and was sentenced to life imprisonment as a sexual psychopath, under the law then in force. On the morning his murder trial began, July 8, 1969, he pleaded guilty to second-degree assault with a deadly weapon on the same woman. The Washington Supreme Court opinion identifies her only by her initials.
What brought Canaday to the attention of the police was the disappearance of yet another young woman in February 1969. When she failed to arrive for a weekend visit, her brother went looking for her. He learned that Canaday had held her captive for about two days. The Washington Supreme Court later set out how the search unfolded. On the evening of Friday, February 21, 1969, after waiting two or three hours for his sister, the brother telephoned a mutual friend to ask whether he knew where she was. The two met at her apartment at about 8 p.m., where two police officers were taking a missing-person report, and the brother said someone had given a description that matched Canaday. The next day the friend called Canaday's former wife, who told him the kind of car Canaday drove and where he lived. The friend drove there, saw a matching white station wagon, and saw the young woman go into the house with a man. He telephoned the brother, who arrived about ten minutes later with an uncle. The young woman ran from the house, and police arrived within minutes. On February 22, 1969, the police arrested Canaday for kidnapping her. She survived and later gave a sworn statement in the case.
How the kidnapping charge itself was resolved was not reported.
In custody, Canaday admitted the January 23 attack. At first he said nothing about the two women who were still missing.
The case changed on March 13, 1969, when Lynne Tuski's body was found near Index. Two days later, after being warned of his rights, Canaday denied knowing anything about her death or about any other missing young woman.
On March 19 he told officers he could help with the two disappearances. On March 20 he gave detailed oral and written confessions to both killings. On March 21 he signed another confession and led officers to Mary Bjornson's body, also near Index.
Officers had already searched his car and his bedroom at his parents' house shortly after his February arrest. Among the items they took was a navy pea coat. At trial, Mary Bjornson's neighbor testified that she had described the stranger who came asking about a man in her building as a young, husky man in a blue navy coat.
King County prosecutors filed an amended information with six counts. Counts one and two charged attempted rape and first-degree murder of Mary Bjornson on January 4, 1969. Counts three and four covered the January 23 attack, to which he pleaded guilty. Counts five and six charged rape and first-degree murder of Lynne Tuski on January 25, 1969.
He was brought to trial on the four counts concerning Mary Bjornson and Lynne Tuski on July 8, 1969, in King County Superior Court before Judge William J. Wilkins. The prosecuting attorney was Christopher T. Bayley, with deputies William L. Kinzel and Patricia G. Harber on the case; Phil Mahoney represented Canaday.
Canaday pleaded not guilty by reason of mental irresponsibility. He testified in his own defense and confirmed his confessions, describing both abductions and both killings.
Three psychiatrists had examined him before trial, in April 1969. Each concluded that he had been sane and not psychotic when the crimes were committed, and that he was able to assist in his defense. At trial, Dr. John B. Riley, called by the defense, described Canaday as a sexual psychopath, testified that this diagnosis excluded insanity, and said that Canaday knew right from wrong. Dr. Richard Jarvis and Dr. George MacDonald testified that he was not insane or mentally irresponsible. With no substantial evidence to support the insanity plea, Judge Wilkins withdrew that defense from the jury.
Under Washington law at the time, the same jury decided both guilt and punishment in a single proceeding. Seven prospective jurors who said they could never vote for a death sentence were excused. The jury found Canaday guilty on all four counts and returned the death penalty on both murder counts. He received 20 years for the attempted rape of Mary Bjornson and life imprisonment for the rape of Lynne Tuski. Judgment was entered on September 26, 1969.
Canaday appealed to the Washington Supreme Court, raising 63 assignments of error. The court, sitting en banc, decided the case on September 23, 1971, in an opinion by Justice Hale. Chief Justice Hamilton concurred in the result, and Justice Sharp did not take part.
The court called the evidence "overwhelming proof of guilt" and took up the main arguments in turn.
The defense sought a new trial on the ground that the kidnapping victim could testify about Canaday's threats and state of mind while she was held. The court found that her own statement did not support the claim, gave no opinion on his sanity, and was not newly discovered, since Canaday knew what she had seen.
The court held that the neighbor's account of what Mary Bjornson had told him shortly before she vanished, and the drawing found in her kitchen, were properly admitted as spontaneous statements. Canaday had not objected at trial, and his own testimony agreed with them.
The court ruled that the trial judge was right to withdraw the insanity defense, since no psychiatrist supported it, and that no separate hearing on his competence to stand trial had been needed. It upheld the Washington statute that let one jury decide guilt and the death penalty together. Citing the United States Supreme Court's decision in McGautha v. California, it held that the Constitution did not bar a single trial with simultaneous verdicts on guilt and punishment, and said that whether to divide such trials into two stages was a question for the Legislature. On the morning of trial, the court noted, Canaday had asked to change his plea on one count to guilty, with no suggestion that he was incompetent, and there was "no evidence whatever to the contrary."
On the searches of his car and bedroom, the court held that the 1969 United States Supreme Court decision in Chimel v. California did not apply to searches made before it was announced, and that in any event the officers had acted reasonably. They had answered an emergency call, found a young woman just freed from a reported abduction, arrested Canaday and advised him of his rights, and then searched the car reported as used in the crime and his bedroom almost at once, looking for weapons and evidence. The court spoke of "the enormous pressures of a sudden and extremely grave emergency" and warned that a contrary rule "would make the law itself a means of destroying and concealing evidence." It also found that the seven prospective jurors who opposed the death penalty had been properly excused under Witherspoon v. Illinois: each had said that, whatever the evidence, he or she could not vote for death, positions the court called "fixed, irrevocable and unalterable."
The remaining assignments of error were rejected as lacking merit. The judgments and both death sentences were affirmed. A petition for rehearing was denied on December 7, 1971.
Canaday was never executed. In 1972, the Associated Press reported, he won a reprieve when a United States Supreme Court ruling effectively struck down the death penalty in more than 30 states, Washington among them. The Peninsula Daily News, reporting his death in 2012, described the same ruling as the end of his death sentence. He remained in prison serving life terms for the two murders.
The Bowman case was taken up again by a Seattle Police Department cold-case squad formed in 2002, the Peninsula Daily News reported. Detective Mike Ciesynski and his partner, Detective Gregg Mixsell, sent DNA evidence preserved from the 1968 investigation for testing. Early in 2004 a forensic scientist at the state crime laboratory matched it to Canaday, whose genetic profile was in the state database because of his 1969 murder convictions.
In June 2004 the two detectives went to the state penitentiary at Walla Walla, where Canaday was held, and told him he had left his DNA at the scene. According to the charging papers, as reported by the Associated Press, he sighed, held up his hands and said, "Yes, I killed her." Ciesynski recalled the moment slightly differently in a 2015 Seattle police account: Canaday, he said, "literally shrugged with his hands and said, 'Yeah, I killed her.'"
In early September 2004 King County prosecutors charged Canaday, then 59, with first-degree murder in Sandra Bowman's death. Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, called it the "oldest 'cold case' ever solved in Washington state." Prosecutors said the killing would have qualified as aggravated murder under current law, but that statute did not exist in 1968, so the charge was first-degree murder, which carried a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Canaday pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2004 to a third life term. The Peninsula Daily News later described the plea as the outcome of 36 years of work by King County police and prosecutors.
Sandra Bowman's husband, who had since remarried, spoke in court in 2004 about the years after her death. "The only reason I didn't kill myself," he said, "is because then people would think I had something to do with it," according to the Seattle Police Department's account.
Less than a month later, he went out for a run and died of a heart attack. His wife later told the detectives what solving the case had meant to him. "You would not believe the difference in him once you solved that case," Ciesynski recalled her saying. "His personality was changed. He was almost beaming, he was so relieved."
"I tell people, that's why we close cold cases," Ciesynski said in 2015. Canaday was already in prison, he noted, but that was the reason the work was done.
John Dwight Canaday died at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center in Clallam County in December 2012. He was 68 and was serving three life sentences. Staff found him unresponsive in an isolated section of the prison shortly before 5:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, and prison medical staff and paramedics from Clallam County Fire District No. 5 could not revive him, the Peninsula Daily News reported on December 30, 2012. Norah West, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections, said his death appeared to be from natural causes; the county coroner's findings were awaited.
The number of women Canaday attacked in the winter of 1968 and 1969 is not settled. The court record establishes the three murders, the January 23, 1969, attack on another young woman and the February kidnapping that led to his arrest. Higher counts of attacks have circulated, but they are not borne out by the court record or by the police and news accounts of the case.
His words to detectives in 2004 are given in two forms: "Yes, I killed her" in the charging papers as reported by the Associated Press, and "Yeah, I killed her" in Ciesynski's recollection in 2015.
The Seattle Police Department's 2015 account says Sandra Bowman's husband testified "at the trial." There was no trial in the Bowman case; Canaday pleaded guilty, and the husband's words were spoken at the court proceedings that followed his plea.
The spelling of Lynne Tuski's first name varies in print; the court opinion and the Associated Press use Lynne. The court record gives his military service only as an honorable discharge from the Navy.
December 17, 1968: Sandra Bowman, 16, is stabbed to death in her home in Ballard, Seattle. The case goes unsolved.
January 4, 1969: Mary Annabelle Bjornson, 21, disappears from her University District apartment.
January 23, 1969: Canaday attacks another young woman.
January 25, 1969: Lynne Carol Tuski, 20, disappears in north Seattle.
February 22, 1969: Canaday is arrested in Seattle for kidnapping a young woman whose brother had gone looking for her.
March 1, 1969: a justice court complaint is filed over the January 23 attack.
March 13, 1969: Lynne Tuski's body is found near Index, Snohomish County.
March 20 and 21, 1969: Canaday confesses to both January killings and leads officers to Mary Bjornson's body near Index.
May 5, 1969: pleads guilty over the January 23 attack and is sentenced to life as a sexual psychopath.
July 8, 1969: pleads guilty to second-degree assault; his murder trial begins before Judge William J. Wilkins.
1969: the jury convicts him on all four counts and returns two death sentences.
September 26, 1969: judgment entered.
September 23, 1971: the Washington Supreme Court affirms the convictions and death sentences.
December 7, 1971: rehearing denied.
1972: a United States Supreme Court ruling ends his death sentences.
2002: Seattle police form a cold-case squad.
Early 2004: the state crime laboratory matches DNA from the Bowman case to Canaday.
June 2004: at Walla Walla, he admits the Bowman killing to detectives.
September 2004: charged with first-degree murder of Sandra Bowman.
2004: pleads guilty and receives a third life sentence.
December 2012: dies at Clallam Bay Corrections Center, aged 68.