Wednesday, May 21, 2003 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

Police ruse leads to arrest in '82 slaying

Seattle Times staff reporters

Cases cracked

Among the cases police say have been solved recently by the Cold Case team, now made up of Seattle detectives Richard Gagnon and Gregg Mixsell and King County prosecutors Steve Fogg and Tim Bradshaw, are the following:

• Earlier this year, Jesus Mezquia, a Cuban who had been living in the Florida Keys, was charged with murder after Seattle investigators said DNA evidence found at the crime scene linked him to the 1993 death of singer Mia Zapata.

• Based on DNA evidence, William Bergen Greene was arrested last year in the strangling of a 25-year-old waitress in 1979.

• Two years ago, Matt Moore was charged in the 1981 slaying of 75-year-old Gladys Bayne on Lower Queen Anne, and Roger Carey Speer was arrested in the 1980 slaying of his aunt, Penelope Hermans, after DNA linked them to the crimes.

According to a Cold Case team member, Speer knew police were coming for him when he heard that Gary Leon Ridgway had been arrested in 2001 on DNA evidence for several of the 20-year-old, so-called Green River killings. "He said he had a sinking feeling in his stomach when he read about Ridgway that we were coming for him," the team member said.

Seattle police spokesman Duane Fish echoed the sentiment. "There is no time limit, and the technology will someday be knocking on (the killers') door."

For years after 13-year-old Kristen Inger Sumstad's body was found in a box behind a TV-repair store in Magnolia, police looked at every lead they could find.

For a while, they entertained the idea that the Green River killer was responsible for Sumstad's 1982 rape and strangulation.

But they kept coming back to John Nicholas Athan, then a 14-year-old neighborhood youth who had been seen carting around a large box the night before Sumstad was found dead.

Now, police say they have the DNA evidence, obtained by tricking Athan into licking an envelope, to prove he was the killer.

Yesterday, Seattle police arrested the now-35-year-old Athan at his home in New Jersey as King County prosecutors filed a murder charge against him in Sumstad's death. The case is the most recent in nearly a dozen old Seattle murder cases that police say have been solved recently with the help of new DNA-testing techniques.

In 1982, Athan was a neighbor to Sumstad and a friend of one of her older sisters, according to court documents filed in King County Superior Court.

Athan moved to New Jersey as an adult to live closer to his mother and now owns a small construction company. He is married but separated from his wife.

According to Seattle police spokesman Duane Fish, Athan had been a suspect since the girl's body was found behind what was then Magnolia TV Service on Nov. 12, 1982. "However, they had no physical evidence linking him to the case until now," Fish said.

At the time of Sumstad's death, semen found on her body was submitted to a crime lab for DNA matching, but there wasn't enough to get a DNA fingerprint based on the science available at the time. Ten years later, detectives tried again, but without success.

Then, last year, investigators submitted the sample once more.

That time, prosecutors say, DNA was found and a unique genetic fingerprint was identified, but there were no matches in any of the existing criminal databanks, according to Fish.

Because Athan was a person of interest, and "the detectives on the case obviously needed a DNA sample from him," Fish said, a ruse was created.

The detectives mailed something to Athan in New Jersey that tricked him into signing a letter or a form, sealing it in an envelope and mailing it back here.

Fish declined to be more specific about the ruse, except to say that the letter "was obtained legally."

Sumstad was the youngest of four daughters raised by their father, Capt. Oddmund Sumstad, a Norwegian immigrant who started Sumstad Navigation Service.

After his death in 1978, Kristen lived with her mother and stepfather, according to newspaper accounts at the time.

Friends and family members said Sumstad, who was a student at McClure Middle School, started running with an older and wilder crowd about a year before her death. And some of them described her as a sweet but troubled child.

The night before her body was found, witnesses reported seeing Athan in the neighborhood, pushing a handcart with a large box. When questioned, according to court documents, he claimed he had used the box to steal firewood from some neighbors.

Athan, who was arrested at his home, was being held yesterday in the Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, N.J., and will face extradition proceedings before being returned to Seattle, where prosecutors are requesting that bail be set at $2.5 million.

He has been charged as an adult. In Washington state, prosecutors explained, suspects are charged given their age upon arrest rather than their age at the time of the crime.

His arrest is another reminder, according to Fish, that unsolved murder cases don't go away.

Christine Clarridge: 206-464-8983 or cclarridge@seattletimes.com