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to have contacted dozens of hotels. They said they couldn’t find any record of two men, a woman, and a child registered.
    Other residents of Tacoma just appeared at the Burr house wanting to help search. The men found themselves subjected to questioning by police. Criminals, after all, were known to return to the scene of the crime and act like a Good Samaritan, offering to help. The men were taken to police headquarters, questioned about the unusual interest they were taking in the case, and released. Many people in the Burr’s North Tacoma neighborhood reported they had heard or seen prowlers or had found their flower gardens trampled; they could give no details but were usually cooperative when police knocked on their doors, asking to search their homes and basements. The exception was Mrs. S___ of North 13th Street. “Widow, very old, would not let us search house,” Officers Meyer and Burk wrote in their report.
    They visited one neighbor, Dorothy H___ , who had arrived home late the night before, the night of the storm, after taking inventory at her bar. As she was doing some wash in the basement, she heard a noise and saw the silhouette of a man’s head very close to a kitchen window. She described him as a large person with bushy hair. She screamed and he ran. She called the police and reported the incident. The police log showed that she had called at 3:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 31, just two hours before Ann was found missing.
    Wives called the police to report that their husbands were acting suspiciously and were spending a lot of time under their house for some unknown reason. Mothers gave alibis to unemployed sons who had a record of brushes with the law or had spent time in the insane asylum. Neighbors reported seeing a midget with a beard peeking in windows. Another neighbor regaled the police with stories of how he had first had sex at age six, and had impregnated one girl when he was just nine.
    What police call “sightseer traffic” began. Hundreds of cars drove past the Burr house, slowing as if to look at Christmas decorations or the scene of a traffic accident. The address—printed in every story and every edition of the newspaper—was by now familiar. Just as Bev and her friends had bicycled by the Mattson home as children and never failed to remark on it being the site of a famous kidnapping, so strangers wanted to see for themselves where this one had happened and feel grateful it wasn’t them.
    In the late afternoon, Tacoma Police Chief Don Hager met with Elgin Olrogg of the Tacoma bureau of the FBI. Later, Agent Olrogg told reporters that he was only observing the case. Police Inspector Smith told reporters that “the girl’s case has not yet been classed as a kidnaping [ sic ] as thus far there are no facts to support such a supposition.”
    The FBI observed for days, never putting its experience at kidnappings to use. It released statements explaining that there was no evidence that someone had entered the Burr house, and that it was convinced Ann had probably wandered or run away. Bev called that “absolutely stupid.”
    Detectives Zatkovich and Strand agreed. They had no use for the FBI. “We used to have to tell the FBI, ‘You guys get out of our hair and we’ll solve the case, and then we’ll call you,’” Zatkovich once explained. “They would send two carloads of strangers over from Seattle on every bank robbery, and we had to wait until they got out of here to go to work.”
    A caption on a photograph of Ann published that week in the Tacoma News Tribune bluntly posed this question: “Was Ann Marie the victim of a sex pervert, or was she abducted by someone who wanted a child?” There was no caption or headline that could suggest anything that hadn’t already occurred to Bev and Don. It was easy to imagine the worst.
    Very quickly, the rumors began. Bev had been married before and the child’s real father had grabbed Ann. Don used to go by another name when he was