Brenda BakerAfter running away from home, 14-year-old Brenda Baker was last seen getting into a truck after hitchhiking near Puyallup, Washington in May 1974. Several weeks later, remains found at Millersylvania State Park would be positively identified as those of Baker. Long suspected as a possible victim of serial killer Ted Bundy, it is likely Baker fell prey to another dangerous killer.
When Brenda Baker, a 14-year-old Washington high school student failed to return home, her family reported her missing. A rebellious teenager, Baker had run away from home in the weeks before her disappearance, when she left her Maple Valley home a second time, on May 25, 1974. As a runaway, Baker was not considered to be in immediate danger.
Her father, Benjamin Baker, could do little but wait for his daughter to return home. One friend told police that Brenda mentioned that she was going to thumb a ride to the US army base at Fort Lewis, Oregon, where she “planned to meet a soldier”. Police were able to trace her movements from her Seattle suburb home to Puyallup.
Friends said they last saw her near Puyallup, where she was hitchhiking. She was described as 5ft 2in, 165-pounds, with brown eyes, brown hair and wearing brown horn-rimmed glasses, and dressed in a tan, hip-length corduroy jacket, red blouse, red stretch knit pants, brown leather shoes and white socks. While her family worried for her safety, police received a break in the case.
On June 17, several weeks after Brenda Baker was last seen, the body of a young woman was found in what was described as an “inaccessible part of Millersylvania State Park”. A property owner, Tom Ismay along with two female companions, made the discovery of the partially clothed decomposed body, which had been reportedly hidden beneath two wooden logs.
The cause of death could not be immediately determined due to the advanced state of decomposition of the remains. A preliminary autopsy was conducted by Tacoma pathologist Dr Charles Larson, who along with two assistants, determined the victim’s age to be roughly between 28 and 34 years. Another, more extensive examination was conducted by Dr William Veach, an Olympia radiologist, who used x-rays to determine the age of the victim as that of a younger woman aged 14 to 19.
This age discrepancy caused initial confusion to investigators. The Thurston County sheriff’s office had recovered several personal items from the body, which included two bracelets, a set of earrings and a ring, which they hoped would help identify the remains. Police then began a search of missing persons, focusing on those anywhere from ages 12-50.
Efforts to identify the remains began almost immediately, and dental impressions were taken, along with fingerprints. Over the next 48 hours, Undersheriff Jack Crawford trawled through missing person reports, when he came across a runaway report of Brenda Baker, who was reported as missing by her family.
While Crawford waited for the dental records, he contacted the Baker family, and asked them about personal affects Brenda had when she went missing. A description of the clothing found on the body seemed a match to what Brenda Baker had been wearing when she run away from home. Her father was invited to view the clothing and personal affects, such as the jewelry found on the body.
Crawford later said of the identification process, “Was like the spoke on a wheel. All the clues we had seemed to lead back to one hub, and that hub was Brenda Joy Baker.” Benjamin Baker positively identified the clothing and the ornamental jewelry, while the dental records returned as a match.
Thurston County Coroner Hollis Fultz released the body to the Baker family, but gave no official cause of death. Along with her father, Baker had two older sisters and a brother who was in the military. Crawford said the King’s County report had been the second complaint against Baker, after she was previously apprehended by Olympia police during the previous incident.
Concerning the investigation, Crawford said Thurston County sheriff’s detectives had travelled to Seattle in an attempt to retrace Brenda’s trail. He added, “We have a lot of people to talk to,” and that the department had several leads to investigate, but they would continue to pursue “any and all tips.”
Police knew Brenda was last seen hitchhiking south, about four blocks from her Maple Valley home. Witnesses then came forward to report seeing a young girl matching Brenda Baker’s description, getting into a vehicle on May 27, 1974. Thurston County Sheriff Don Redmond said he was seeking the identity of two male occupants of a blue pickup seen Southbound from Puyallup.
The pickup reportedly carried Brenda Baker, who was seen at around 5:00pm or 6:00pm. Police refused to comment on whether Baker’s death was attributed to hitchhiking. Thurston County Coroner Hollis Fultz later ruled Baker’s death a homicide, with the cause of death listed as strangulation or knife wounds, and that she had been dead for two-to-three weeks prior to the discovery.
For some detectives, they saw a similarity between Brenda Baker’s death, and the murder of Katherine Devine, another 14-year-old who was abducted on November 25, 1973, and whose body was found the following month McKenney State Park in the Capitol State Forest near Olympia, Washington. The Ingraham high school student had been sodomized and strangled.
Devine had also hitchhiked out of the Seattle area, however, a spokesman for the department said there was no evidence of any connection between the two cases. Thurston County detectives were also investigating the disappearance of Donna Manson, who vanished from Evergreen State College on March 12, 1974.
Other cases involving missing college-aged women were also being investigated by Washington authorities, including the January 1974 disappearance of Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Rancourt, who went missing from Central Washington State College on April 17, and Oregon State University student Roberta Parks, who had been missing since May 6th.
All of these women were reported to have disappeared under suspicious circumstances, however detectives had no major leads in any of the cases. For some investigators, there was the theory that these missing person cases were possibly connected to a single perpetrator. An unknown man had been reportedly seen in the vicinity of the Rancourt disappearance, with his arm in a sling asking for assistance from students.
In early 1975, an anonymous person called the Thurston County Sheriff’s department to report witnessing what he described as a suspicious male occupying a secluded shack on the Black River at roughly the same times that corresponded with the murders of Katherine Devine and Brenda Baker. The caller explained he had been grouse hunting in late November, when he stumbled across the man.
This occurred in the area of the Black River, where he came across an old shack and saw a male and two young girls, aged about 12 or 14. The caller then went on to explain that he returned to the shack in January 1975, but found it abandoned. Nearby, he found the scattered remains, those of six dog and one cat carcass, all of which had been skinned and the bones removed.
Over the course of three weeks, the shack remained vacant, until the caller said he returned and saw someone he thought might be the same individual. The caller and a friend then returned again, and reported they were fired upon. The unknown caller told police that the time when the man was at the shack, and when the two homicides were discovered were around the same time.
A second witness came forward to tell investigators he saw a young woman matching Brenda Baker’s description was seen hitchhiking near the Scott Lake interchange on Interstate 5 in May 1974. Bill Sullivan told detectives he and his wife stopped at a truck stop at the Scott Lake interchange on either May 10 or 11.
There, they saw a girl who may have been Brenda Baker hitchhiking, and said the girl got into an older model light-coloured panel truck that was being driven by a bearded man. Sullivan said the truck came from the direction of Scott Lake. Baker was not reported missing from her Seattle home until May 25, 1974.
By August 1975, a suspect had been arrested in connection with numerous Washington disappearances. Ted Bundy, at that time a Utah law student, was suspected of involvement in the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch, who had been approached by a man pretending to be a police officer, and who proceeded kidnap DaRonch, who barely escaped the encounter.
Investigators also suspected Bundy in the abduction and murder of Caryn Campbell, who had been taken from the Snowmass ski resort in Colorado. Her naked and battered body was found weeks later. A subsequent search of Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle uncovered hair samples that were connected to Campbell, and three other young women who had been reported missing.
Many investigators suspected Ted Bundy had committed many murders in Washington, Utah and Colorado, with some estimating as many as a dozen or so victims. In June 1976, Bundy was found guilty and of the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and sentenced to between one and fifteen years. He was then extradited to Colorado to face charges over the murder of Caryn Campbell.
During his incarceration, Bundy escaped twice. During his second escape, he successfully travelled to Florida, and there perpetrated the murders of two college students at the Chi Omega sorority house, wounding three others, and later the murder of 12-year-old Kimberley Leach. Not long after these crimes, Bundy, who had been added to the FBI Most Wanted List, was recaptured.
Charged with these three murders, Bundy was found guilty and sentenced to death during two separate trials. Although he continued to claim his innocence, Bundy was suspected in the murders of another twenty young women who had disappeared between 1973 and 1975. One of those was Brenda Baker, whose murder occurred during similar disappearances in Washington.
During his death row confessions, that took place shortly before his execution in January 1989, Ted Bundy was asked about his involvement in the murders of both Katherine Devine and Brenda Baker. Although he confessed to several unsolved murders, Bundy denied any knowledge of the two cases, refusing to admit his involvement.
In 1986, Thurston County detectives interviewed a suspect in prison about his possible involvement in the murder of Katherine Devine. William Cosden Jr., who was serving a 32-year-old sentence for the 1975 rape of Beverly Pearson, a Thurston County resident, denied having anything to do with Devine’s death.
Cosden, who was a 26-years-old Vietnam vet at the time of Devine’s murder, had resided with his family on Lake Scott. He had been released from a mental institution in 1973, following the 1967 sexual assault and murder of a young woman in Maryland. Cosden had been deemed as “no longer be a threat to society.” Without any firm evidence of his involvement, Cosden could not be linked to the murder of Katherine Devine.
On March 7, 2002, the Thurston County Sheriff’s office announced that they finally solved the murder of Kathy Devine. By using DNA collection from the original crime scene, investigators were able to determine that William Cosden Jr. was the killer of Katherine Devine. His DNA was matched to a vaginal swab taken from Devine during her autopsy.
Presented with the evidence, Cosden eventually admitted to having sex with the teenager, but denied her murder. At the time her case was solved, the murder of Katherine Devine was the oldest open murder case in the history of Washington State to have been solved through the use of “DNA fingerprinting.”
For the family of Brenda Baker, and the detectives who worked her case, Cosden’s conviction for the Devine murder brought renewed hope that her killer would be caught. There were strong suspicions that Cosden had committed both the Devine and Baker murders, however, without evidence linking him to the crime, the case would remain cold.
Baker’s sister, Charlene, revealed that detectives who worked Brenda’s case suspected Cosden was responsible, not Ted Bundy. But for the Baker family, there was little faith her murder would be solved, primarily because investigators had failed to take any DNA samples from the crime scene, and so have nothing to compare to a potential suspect.
Although Ted Bundy is often considered a strong suspect in the murder of Brenda Baker, and the fact he had committed similar abductions and murder around the same time, for the family of Baker and Thurston County authorities, the prime suspect in the case is William Cosden Jr., who has himself denied any involvement. The murder of Brenda Baker remains officially unsolved.
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