25 years after mother’s death, sisters wait for answers

Published 10:37 pm Tuesday, June 2, 2009

EVERETT — Judy Weaver left the Bell-Ness Cafe in downtown Everett and started walking home.

It likely was a busy night along Hewitt Avenue, 25 years ago this week. The Salty Sea Days celebration was winding down.

Weaver stopped — as she often did — at Dairy Queen, a half-block from her home on Rucker Avenue. She probably ordered a dish of vanilla ice cream. She may have left with a young man, somebody a witness thought Weaver already knew.

The stop at the fast-food restaurant was the last time anyone remembers seeing Weaver alive.

Just after midnight on June 2, 1984, a passerby used a pay phone to call 911 and report a fire in the one-story, five-unit brick apartment building on the corner of 35th Street and Rucker.

Smoke was pouring out of Weaver’s apartment.

When firefighters rushed in, they made a gruesome discovery. The 42-year-old was tied up with a phone cord, strangled, brutalized and dead.

Her killing remains a mystery. Her family continues to look for answers.

“It’s not going to bring Mom back,” Weaver’s daughter, Cathy Myers said. “But it’s going to be closure.”

The clues that would solve the cold-case homicide likely lie in a strand of DNA or a confession not yet shared with police.

Two veteran Everett police detectives who rushed to the scene years ago still are working to help Weaver’s family.

In 1984, Gary Woodburn was a traffic cop; Pete Grassi an arson investigator. Today, Woodburn is the sergeant in charge of the major crimes unit and Grassi an inspector in the office of professional standards.

They remember the night of the killing.

Grassi conducted the initial investigation into what sparked the fire. Years later, he took on the killing investigation, too, as a homicide detective.

In 2002, Grassi went back into the department’s file to look for old evidence that might yield fresh clues.

A piece of carpeting from the apartment and cigarette butt from a potential suspect offered the best hope. State Patrol crime analysts produced a readable strand of DNA, but it didn’t match the one person police were looking at in the case. That man was cleared. The DNA hasn’t returned a match in any law enforcement database.

Now police say the case is basically stalled.

“There’s nothing to do at this point,” Grassi said.

The case likely will remain unsolved until DNA produces a match in a computer database, or “someone comes forward to say, ‘I have information,’ ” Grassi said.

The odds are slim that a new suspect will be identified, Woodburn said. In a quarter-century-old case, the detective isn’t hopeful.

“The killer could be dead,” he said.

The loss still is alive for Weaver’s two daughters, Myers, 45, and Colleen Kayser, 48.

Tears and laughter mix when the women talk about their mom.

“People liked her; she was likeable,” Kayser said.

Weaver was born and raised in Everett. At 17, she was crowned the queen of a local beauty pageant. A treasured photo shows her broad smile.

Weaver worked with her mother, Edith Perrault, and Myers at the Bell-Ness. She was street-smart, and kept a gun in the restaurant’s basement. It was safety in case she was ever confronted while counting the till.

All of Weaver’s relatives have their own theories, tested, tossed about and retold over the years about what might have happened: Perhaps Weaver was upset about some type of illegal activity at the Bell-Ness? Was she preparing to talk to police?

A brother recalls a phone call from Weaver days before the killing with an urgent request to talk. The siblings never had that conversation.

“He’s always wondered all these years: Did she know something might be happening?” Kayser said.

Myers remembers working with her mom at the Bell-Ness the day before the killing.

Then, “I got a knock at the door at 6 a.m.,” she said.

Kayser was living in North Pole, Alaska, in June 1984. A state trooper reached her, and she needed to drive six miles to the nearest phone.

“You never think you’re going to get that call to say that it’s a homicide,” she said.

Today, Weaver would have been a grandmother of four. There are a grandson and granddaughter in Alaska, a grandson in British Columbia and a granddaughter in California.

She met Levi, the oldest grandchild, when he was 4 months old. At his birth, “It’s a boy!” signs went up at the Bell-Ness.

Weaver was excited to welcome more grandchildren, Kayser said.

The children came, “She just never got to meet them,” Myers said.

All these years later, Weaver’s daughters say they mainly want the mystery solved for their grandmother.

Next week, Perrault will turn 91. Kayser said she wants answers while Perrault is still alive.

“She does not need to leave this world without knowing who or why,” she said.

Jackson Holtz: 425-339-3437, jholtz@heraldnet.com.

You can help

Anyone with information about the June 2, 1984, killing of Judy Weaver is asked to call the Everett police tip line, 425-257-8450.