EVERETT — Handed a picture of her sister’s salmon-covered shorts, Kelli Littlejohn couldn’t help but cry.
Those were the shorts that, in a way, unlocked the case of Melissa Lee’s killing for investigators — through a small bloodstain forensic scientists used years later to get a DNA sample. Years after that, authorities linked the DNA to a used cigarette butt stomped out by Alan Dean at his Bothell home.
But to Littlejohn, those shorts were just her older sister’s night clothes, the ones she was wearing when her body was found on April 14, 1993, below the Edgewater Creek Bridge. Melissa Lee, 15, would wear them when getting ready for bed, as Littlejohn testified Monday at Dean’s first-degree murder trial.
Melissa Lee would never go out in her night clothes, recalled Littlejohn, who was 11 when her sister was strangled to death.
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“She wouldn’t even check the mailbox like that,” said Littlejohn, who now has a tattoo with her sister’s name on her chest, in Snohomish County Superior Court.
Littlejohn was one of several family members and friends who testified Monday and Tuesday in the long-awaited trial. Melissa Lee’s case was long cold, until the blood on the shorts led detectives to Dean, who they arrested in 2020. The pursuit of justice was further delayed due to concerns about the defendant’s mental health.
In opening statements Monday, the defense argued Dean, now 66, wasn’t the killer. Instead, they pinned the blame on Melissa Lee’s ex-boyfriend, T.J. Peters, who is expected to testify later in the trial. They had broken up just days before the slaying.
Melissa Lee’s mother Sharon took the stand Tuesday. When deputy prosecutor Craig Matheson showed her a picture of her daughter on the autopsy table, she immediately started sobbing, as did Littlejohn watching from the gallery.
“Oh my God,” Lee gasped on the witness stand.
With that, Matheson closed his questioning of Sharon Lee.
Public defender Heather Wolfenbarger asked Judge Millie Judge to grant a mistrial, arguing Matheson’s move was “prosecutorial misconduct” meant to “inflame the passions of the jury” and “derail” the defense’s cross-examination of her. Matheson responded that he needed the mother to identify her deceased daughter to prove she was, indeed, the victim in the case.
Judge denied the defense’s motion.
Sharon Lee, who now lives in South Carolina, remembered her daughter as a “handful.”
Melissa Lee liked nice clothes and, like Littlejohn said, never left the house with a hair out of place, her mother testified Tuesday. She was always using one of the two landlines in their home in the 19800 block of Filbert Road north of Bothell. At 15, she smoked Newports. She experimented with acid and cannabis and told her mother about it.
Krista Stromberg was Melissa Lee’s best friend. They saw each other daily.
“It was always Krista,” Sharon Lee recalled.
Sometimes they would go on a talk line together — a number you could call to connect with strangers. They’d give false ages to make them seem older, Stromberg testified Tuesday.
Only once did they meet someone from the talk line. In mid-March 1993, a month before the killing, the man picked them up in a periwinkle Ford Thunderbird, wearing acid-washed jeans. Stromberg described him as a “rocker-looking kind of guy.”
Stromberg and Melissa Lee had plans the night of April 13, 1993. Stromberg was babysitting and then would come over to Melissa Lee’s house on Filbert Road. But babysitting went on longer than expected.
Melissa Lee called her mother at a local bar, where she was playing darts. According to Sharon Lee’s testimony, T.J. Peters threatened to come attack his ex-girlfriend at the house that night.
Around 2 a.m., she went home with her fiance. They found the front door appeared to have been kicked in. Couch cushions were tossed about. Her pet macaw had gotten out of its cage and was “screaming bloody murder.”
Within hours, friends on a walk found the victim’s body below the bridge, her clothes — including the shorts and a San Jose Sharks sweatshirt — dirty and disheveled. An autopsy found she’d been sexually assaulted and strangled. A common anesthetic, ethyl ether, was found in her system.
Littlejohn was staying with family on Whidbey Island when she learned her sister had died. Her aunt got a call.
“Oh my God, are you serious?” Littlejohn recalled her aunt saying on the phone.
The aunt told her something had happened to Melissa Lee, but didn’t say what.
“I didn’t think death,” Littlejohn testified. “I thought broken leg, a broken arm.”
They drove to her grandfather’s house. The grandfather looked her in the eyes and broke the news: “Somebody killed your sister.”
“That is exactly how I was told, no emotion,” Littlejohn said in court. “I immediately looked at my aunt and I said, ‘I want to go home.’”
When she got home, cops were everywhere.
The trial started Monday. It’s expected to last two weeks.
Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.
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