The Lake, the Forest
How the Lake Sammamish Murders helped inspire ‘The Last House on Needless Street’
By Catriona Ward
It’s a misconception that those who write crime, thrillers and horror are more resilient to the subject matter than others. I find you can only write impactfully about something if you feel the impact of it yourself. Certain crimes weave their way into the imagination and cling to your subconscious. The ones that reverberate throughout ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ have horrified me as long as I can remember.
It’s almost impossible to talk about this novel without revealing the bones of the plot. But I’ll do my best to describe what fed into it and why this book burned in me, demanding to be written.
In ‘The Last House on Needless Street,’ children have been going missing from the lakeshore for years. None have ever been found. Dee’s little sister, Lulu, was one of the missing children, and Dee has been searching for her abductor ever since. She thinks she has found him. Ted Bannerman lives in a boarded-up house at the end of Needless Street with his daughter, Lauren, and his disapproving cat, Olivia. Lauren and Olivia don’t go outside. Needless Street ends in the wild, Olympic forest, and is only a short hike from the lake. Dee moves into the vacant house next door to Ted’s and begins her watch. She has to be sure it’s him. When Ted’s daughter Lauren goes missing, suspicion turns to terror.
There were thousands of people at Lake Sammamish, in Washington State on July 14th 1974, when Ted Bundy abducted two women from the crowded summer shores. He approached Janice Ott with his arm in a cast and a sling, asking for her help to move a sailboat. He drove a gold VW Bug. A few hours later, he used the same ruse to lure Denise Naslund away as she made her way to the restroom.1 He approached several other women that afternoon, always giving his name - Ted. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were the fifth and sixth women to go missing in the area that year. They were not the last.
We feel safe in crowds, in numbers, surrounded by our families. We don’t expect the monstrous to pursue us out of the night, into the blazing light of a summer day. The Lake Sammamish murders were staggering in their greed and cruelty. These women died for their kindness, for wishing to assist what they thought was an injured stranger. As Denise Naslund’s mother told the Seattle Times, ‘she had the kind of helpful nature that would place her in danger.’2
This day has always had a cold grip on my imagination. Ted Bannerman in ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ is not directly based on Ted Bundy. But a sense of the grief and violent loss Bundy inflicted on victims and their families permeates the book, which is full of echoes of that summer day at the lake in 1974. The very setting seems to me an array of disturbing, arresting contrasts. The deep, cool woods of Washington, the burning light on the lake-water. Two women taken from the midst of a crowd, for lonely death.
The investigative team appealed for all the negatives and film taken by visitors to the lake that day to be sent to them. This image haunts me, too - police combing through holiday photos of smiling families, searching the background for a murderer with his arm in a cast, and his gold VW bug. They found several images of the car in the parking lot. Home video from that day, only discovered in 2018 in the King County archives, shows the gold Volkswagen boxed in by a patrol vehicle, surrounded by milling officers. Bundy is not in the car.3
Washington State has a grim history with serial killers. Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, murdered so many women around Tacoma and Seattle during the 1980s and 90’s that he lost count. The estimate is 71. During this investigation detectives approached Bundy, then awaiting execution on death row, for insight into how the killer’s mind might work. They also hoped that by encouraging Bundy to talk, they might glean more information about his own crimes. It was a Faustian pact, giving Bundy what he wanted most – power and the sense of importance he craved, as well as titillating details of Gary Ridgeway’s crime scenes, and the chance to relive his own.
The search for Denise Naslund and Janice Ott intensified, as the summer of 1974 turned to fall. The two women seemed to have vanished without a trace, swallowed whole by the land and the forest. Their remains were found in September, that hot fateful year, on a hillside two miles distant from Lake Sammamish. Homicide detective Robert Keppel recalled his first sight of the scene:
‘The surrounding tree cover was so dense that even in daylight the forest floor was very dark, like the mysterious landscape in a fairy tale and only occasional sunbursts escaped through the small openings in the canopy of leaves.’4
That part of the Pacific Northwest is rich in wildlife – elk, deer, herons, scavengers like raccoons and wild dogs. Certain artefacts were recovered from the scene - coyote faeces containing human hand bones; a bird’s nest entwined with long blond hair. Just how long, Keppel wondered, had it taken for the birds to learn to use human hair in this way? How long had this place been used? Vertebrae and pieces of leg bone belonging to an unknown third woman were also found. She has never been conclusively identified, though Bundy later claimed the remains belonged to eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins. The wilderness had indeed begun to absorb Denise Naslund, Janice Ott and the third woman back into itself.
These details are at the heart of ‘The Last House on Needless Street’ – the wilderness of those parts, and how it can swallow people, is part of the fabric of the book. The birds have no concept of how horrifying their nests are. Coyotes will always eat whatever they can find. Similarly, the forest at the end of Needless Street is vast and indifferent to human suffering.
It’s neither good nor bad, but its own roiling force. It does not distinguish between human evil, suffering, love or hope. Human endeavour is overrun by the wild, leaving no trace.
But love and hope do endure, and can even be born, in the face of horror and suffering. Having conjured this atrocity in ‘The Last House on Needless Street,’ I was determined that compassion and life must also thread their way through the novel - like filigree perhaps, or golden hair, woven into a nest for hatching birds.
1 https://www.newspapers.com/clip/31113871/remains-of-janice-anne-ott-and-denise/
2 https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/remembering-the-washington-victims-of-ted-bundy-the-serial-killer-spotlighted-in-new-movie-and-netflix-docuseries/
3 https://www.kiro7.com/living/dating/never-before-seen-film-shows-ted-bundys-vw-where-he-killed-two-women-in-1974/696707928/
4 ‘The Riverman: Ted Bundy and the Hunt for the Green River Killer,’ Keppel, Robert D., Pocket Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, New York, !995. Ebook, location 381
The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward Published by Profile Books (Out Now)
This is the story of a serial killer. A stolen child. Revenge. Death. And an ordinary house at the end of an ordinary street. All these things are true. And yet they are all lies... You think you know what's inside the last house on Needless Street. You think you've read this story before. That's where you're wrong. In the dark forest at the end of Needless Street, lies something buried. But it's not what you think...
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