TACOMA — The woman entered the credit union and asked for directions. It was a warm, dry day, but she wore a raincoat. She draped clothes across one arm and carried a plastic bag stuffed with her belongings. Sores covered her gaunt face.
She had been walking from Ruston to the waterfront when she stopped at the traffic-only tunnel. Not sure how to get around, she entered Tacoma Narrows Federal Credit Union about 3:15 p.m. May 8. Patricia Loomis was working the front desk.
The exchange took only a few minutes. Loomis described a path that wasn’t a direct shot but would safely take her to Ruston Way. The woman nodded as she listened. She left.
Loomis didn’t know the woman’s name: Rosemary Dye. She didn’t know that Rosemary was an accomplished aviator. She didn’t know that Rosemary helped make strides for women in the cockpit. She didn’t know that Rosemary once owned a big house on Anderson Island. She just knew that the woman displayed the telltale signs of homelessness and methamphetamine abuse.
“I was very saddened by how she left,” Loomis said last week. “I can’t exactly say why, but I was just sad. Just a sad, unsettling feeling.”
Later that evening, Ruston police officers discovered 51-year-old Rosemary Dye’s body along the train tracks not far from the credit union.
A love of flight
Beezer, as her friends and family called Rosemary, grew up in Tacoma’s North End. Her family’s home had views of Commencement Bay. On a clear day, you could see all the way to Stadium High School, from which she graduated. The family hosted pool parties during the summer and bridge games year-round.
Her father was a physician who still made house calls. Fourth of July was a big celebration at the Dye house, complete with live music and fireworks.
“She was always so happy, so funny,” childhood friend Maria Dippolito said. “I have so many good memories of her. And I really looked up to her.”
Rosemary’s love of flight began in a dusty West Texas town. She and a friend were working in Odessa the summer after high school.
One of Rosemary’s co-workers owned a small plane and offered to take her up. Once in the air, he let her take control.
“It had never occurred to her that she could possibly do so,” her father, David Dye, wrote before his death in 2001 in an unpublished family memoir. “From the moment she took the wheel, she was obsessed and addicted.”
She enrolled in Clover Park Technical College’s aviation program, but finding full-time work wasn’t easy: The old boys’ network thrived in the cockpit in the 1970s.
Rosemary took occasional assignments delivering cargo when she had a chance. After attending a flight school in Florida, she returned to Washington, joined the Air Force Reserve and was stationed at McChord Air Force Base. A recruiter told her a spot for a woman interested in being a pilot wouldn’t open for 18 months, so she enlisted as a mechanic. She later became a flight engineer.
In 1986, Transamerica Airlines offered her a job flying cargo in a C-130 Hercules. She was the first female flight crew member in the company, her father wrote. Four months later, the company folded, and Rosemary took a job with Evergreen International Airlines. Again, she was one of the first women in the cockpit.
Rosemary helped ferry cargo around the world — the South Pacific, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. More flight hours led to better assignments. And when United Parcel Service began hiring pilots to fly DC-8s, they called Rosemary.
Rosemary flew international routes for UPS. She bought a house beside Lake Josephine on Anderson Island. Life seemed good.
Four treatment attempts
But Rosemary was an alcoholic. Vodka was her drink.
“She felt like she could hide it better on her breath,” said her mother, also named Rosemary.
The younger Dye first entered treatment for alcoholism in 1999. It was her first of four trips to treatment. Craig Dye, one of her brothers, said Rosemary had difficulty admitting she had a problem, and she rarely attended support group meetings.
The addiction steadily became worse.
In 2001, Rosemary’s San Francisco treatment center allowed her to travel home for Christmas during her recovery. On the drive to her parents’ home, she stopped at a liquor store and bought a handful of one-shot bottles. She guzzled them in the kitchen while the rest of the family was in the living room.
Later that night, the rest of the family heard a scream. Rosemary had been talking to her nieces in another room when she passed out and fell face-first onto the floor.
The cycle of treatment and relapse became incompatible with work. In 2004, she was fired.
Her career as a pilot was over.
Rosemary lost her house on Anderson Island after UPS fired her, but she used the money in her 401(k) account to buy a home in northeast Tacoma in 2005.
That’s about when Craig and his mother believe Rosemary began using drugs.
She also became a regular at casinos. But, of course, the house always wins.
Rosemary asked Craig for money to help make mortgage payments. He didn’t want to hand over cash, so he instead offered to fix things around the house.
In retrospect, evidence of drug use was spread throughout her home.
“I saw little pieces of tinfoil with weird little burn marks on them,” he said. “I was like, ‘What is this?’ I asked her, and she said she didn’t know.”
Denials about meth
In September 2006, the bank foreclosed on her house and she moved into a hotel. The contact with her family became less frequent. Her physical appearance changed: Her front teeth fell out. She lost weight. Her complexion turned blotchy.
She tried to break from the lifestyle last April. Craig offered her a place to stay and helped fix her car; she had neglected to repair two flat, completely bald tires.
When she moved in, he asked if she had been using drugs.
“I’ve tried some,” she said.
“Have you tried meth?” he asked.
“I’ve tried it three times,” she responded. “And I’m afraid of it.”
Last Sept. 18, a Sumner police officer pulled Rosemary over for speeding. Police discovered a straw and a white crystalline substance in a fanny pack, court papers say. She first claimed it was dental filler, and then said it wasn’t hers. People had been partying in her vehicle, she told the officer.
A few days later, she tried to kill herself. She swallowed a handful of pills and washed them down with booze. She called her ex-boyfriend to say goodbye. He called Craig’s wife, Noreen Dye, who called 911.
A nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup told the family Rosemary had meth in her system. And, she added, the drug was there during two previous visits that year.
That was just too much for the family to bear. The day after Rosemary’s suicide attempt, Craig and his wife cleaned out her room at their house. They talked on the phone one more time, but they never saw each other again.
The family isn’t sure where she moved when the hospital discharged her.
Rosemary resurfaced again in January. She called her mother one day in January and asked to borrow $20 for gas. She arrived at the apartment, apologized for trying to steal $350 from her mother’s checking account the previous October, and left.
The family then lost all contact with her until she arrived unannounced at the house of her brother Mike and his wife, Jeri, on May 7. Rosemary had a black eye and a cut on her lip. Her ex-boyfriend told them she had been staying at a shelter, where another woman attacked her.
The family had adopted a tough-love strategy toward their sister. They told her to go to a hospital. She left.
A body discovered
The first call to the BNSF Railway dispatch center arrived at 6 p.m. the next day. A conductor felt the train hit something on the tracks. He believed it was an animal inside the tunnel. The second call to the dispatch center — this one describing a possible injured person — was made at 9:15 p.m.
Twelve trains traversed the track between the two calls.
The Ruston Police Department suspended all traffic through the narrow tunnel and entered on foot. A Tacoma police officer was the first to discover Rosemary’s body, about 200 feet inside the northern entrance to the tunnel.
Police found Rosemary’s driver’s license among her belongings. She also carried a debit card, a bus route map, a crossword puzzle book, a brown wallet, a King County library card, a glasses case, a wristwatch and sunglasses.
It appears likely that a southbound freight train traveling 35 to 40 mph hit her, but such details do little to help answer the deeper questions.
The scenarios are numerous: Rosemary could have fallen asleep or passed out on the tracks. She might have been taking a shortcut. She could have tried jumping a ride in an open car. A piece of clothing could have been caught in the tracks. A train might have hit her outside the tunnel and dragged her inside.
“We think it was an accident,” Ruston interim police Chief Sharon Reese said. “But really, we don’t really know what happened that day.”
Loomis, the credit union employee, watched a television report about a body being found along the tracks not far from work. She had a gut feeling and called the Ruston Police Department the next day.
Officers reviewed surveillance video. It was difficult to make out Rosemary’s face, Loomis said, but police matched the raincoat with the one found in the tunnel.
Loomis likely was the last person to see Rosemary alive.
When Loomis read Rosemary’s obituary in the paper, emotions overwhelmed her. The picture showed a vibrant, healthy, happy woman. The person who asked for directions was almost someone else.
“Yeah, that was her,” she said. “But she didn’t really look like that by the time I saw her.”
The medical examiner’s office didn’t identify the body until Monday. The family believes finding a next of kin was difficult; Rosemary had no spouse and no children. She and her mother shared the same name, likely adding confusion.
But Rosemary’s sister-in-law couldn’t shake a gnawing feeling. Jeri called the Ruston Police Department that Tuesday.
Officials asked about her relationship to Rosemary but told her they couldn’t release information. Jeri called Craig, who contacted the police.
Craig became the first member of Rosemary’s family to learn that his sister was dead.
Rosemary’s mother had left for Jamaica the day her daughter died and wasn’t scheduled to return for another five days. At first, the family wasn’t sure how or when to tell her.
“We talked about it, agonized about it, but we agreed: Why make it a miserable plane ride back for her?” Craig said.
Her sons were at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to greet her. Amid the commotion of thousands of travelers scurrying to catch flights or pick up bags, Rosemary Dye learned her daughter was dead.
‘This drug is a poison’
The family has begun sorting through Rosemary’s possessions. The police have turned over the things they found with her. Someone she had been living with at the time of her death called the family and returned the rest of her possessions.
Some things, like her car, are missing. It might have been sold. Or stolen. The family isn’t sure. But they try to focus on the positives. Like her sense of humor. Or her generosity.
Little things, like the memory of her competitive attitude toward Scrabble, elicit spontaneous moments of silence.
Her death hasn’t been easy on them. The family wants Rosemary’s story to be told to help warn of the dangers of drug addiction.
Earlier this month, Craig held his sister’s driver’s license in his hands. He looked at the picture of a smiling woman, and he thought of meth.
“This drug is a poison,” Craig said. “It kills people. It destroys families.”
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