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articles. She sounded hopeful. “She may show up any minute,” Bev said. “She might have walked outside and got locked out some way. She knew her phone number. If only we would get a call.”
    A gaunt and sad Bev Burr was interviewed by a Seattle television station, which had made a rare trip out of the city, with a huge camera and lights, to record the search on black and white film. “Probably the worst has happened to our little girl. And, uh, I just hope they find her,” Bev told the reporter.
    Bev would second-guess herself—and the police—for the rest of her life. “I should have let her stay with [a neighbor child] that night. Ann was so trusting. It was a big mistake. We taught her everyone was good. We didn’t teach them that people could be bad.” She had her doubts about the police, too. “I always thought they should have set up a roadblock, instead of asking questions, so many questions.”
    Police did not set up a roadblock, maybe because Tacoma had dozens of entrances and exits, by land, sea, and air. There was wilderness to both the east and west, and there was water, a lot of it. Tacoma is on Puget Sound, a body of water with a complex series of islands, inlets, and harbors bounded on the north by Canada and surrounded by two massive mountain ranges, the Olympics and the North Cascades. It would be easy to disappear with a small girl.
    Julie, Greg, and Mary were sent to a neighbor’s home for the day, so Bev and Don could speak candidly with police and so they could telephone family members.
    Don’s younger brother, Raleigh, and his wife Sharon, arrived from the small town of Grandview, in eastern Washington. Although Raleigh was 12 years younger than Don, they were close. Don, Raleigh, and their sisters had grown up in Grants Pass, Oregon.
    As a teenager, Raleigh had worked for Don and their father, logging in northern California. Raleigh had babysat Ann when she was a newborn while they all lived in tents in the summer. When Ann went missing, Raleigh had to borrow a car from the dealership where he worked to make the long, hot drive over the mountains to Tacoma.
    “There was a lot of police activity,” Raleigh Burr remembered about the day. “They questioned us—where we were from, who we were. There was coffee on the stove. Don was sitting on a couch with his eyes closed. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t respond. I didn’t see any hysteria. Some people had brought food, probably Bev’s church friends or high school friends. I was so sure everything would turn out all right; there must be an explanation.”
    Other family arrived, too. Jeff Leach was Bev’s nephew, her brother Jerry’s boy. Jeff was exactly Ann’s age. His family often joined the Burrs at Fox Island, where Bev’s father owned two small, rustic cabins. After the phone call that Ann was missing, Jeff’s family immediately left their home in Seattle for Tacoma. Jeff Leach remembers helping put up the posters with Ann’s photo, and the tension and fear in the Burr house. “It terrified me a lot,” he says of his cousin’s disappearance. “We didn’t wander too far.”
    After the citizens of Tacoma saw the newspaper stories about Ann Burr, they telephoned the police with tips. Sometimes the calls were about the obvious. Had the police checked the Burr’s attic? Were they sure? What about the furnace? Police got calls from a man with a divining rod, offering to help look for Ann. Another said that if he was given a sock of Ann’s, he was sure he could trace her. The police considered them “crackpots” but politely took their names, phone numbers, and addresses and checked to see, first, if they were known sex offenders. Then they followed-up on some of the tips. One caller said Ann was in a Portland area hotel with two men and a woman. Tacoma police asked their colleagues in Portland to check it out. Within a surprisingly short period of time—a couple of hours—Portland police called back and claimed