Hallie Ann Seaman was a standout University of Washington student two terms away from earning a master's degree in architecture.
Described by friends as intelligent, strong-willed and athletic, the 25-year-old was studying how to design quality low-income housing — and she was at her drafting table in UW's architecture building when she was last seen alive on the night of April 29, 1975.
The next afternoon, a man on his lunch break discovered Seaman's body concealed in bushes bordering a parking lot on Eastlake Avenue East and called Seattle police.
She had been sexually assaulted and repeatedly stabbed at an unknown location hours earlier, and her station wagon had been set ablaze 4 miles south of where her body was found.
It would take nearly five decades — and a stroke of serendipity — for her killer to be unmasked.
"Really, the craziness about this story is who ended up being the suspect," said Seattle police Detective Rolf Norton, who began reviewing Seaman's unsolved homicide in 2017.
In August, Norton received an email from William Stubbs, a forensic scientist at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, saying a lab report would be forthcoming.
"He's like, 'Well, I think it's going to surprise you, what the result is,' and I'm like, 'Pfft. OK, surprise me,' " recalled Norton, who's worked homicide cases for 22 years. "And so he sent me a copy of the reports ... and I was blown away."
DNA found on Seaman's body identified her likely killer as Charles Rodman Campbell, a convicted triple-murderer who was executed by hanging in 1994.
Campbell was a widely reviled figure whose trial, appeals, prison abuse allegations and last-ditch efforts to avoid execution generated hundreds of news stories — and his own Wikipedia page.
A prison psychologist in 1979 described Campbell as "conscienceless," "blithely uncaring of others" and "imminently harmful to all who directly or indirectly capture his attention or interest," The Seattle Times reported. Even his parents considered him a "bad seed" and said that executing him was the only way to ensure he never hurt anyone again.
Triple murder in Snohomish County
In December 1974, four months before Seaman was killed in Seattle, Campbell forced Renae Wicklund to perform a sex act while he held a knife to her 1-year-old daughter in Clearview.
He remained a fugitive for 13 months until he was arrested for burglary in Okanogan County, then brought back to Snohomish County, where he was convicted of assault and sodomy.
Wicklund and her friend and neighbor, Barbara Hendrickson, testified against Campbell at trial.
He was given a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison but served less than six.
Then, while on work release in April 1982, Campbell killed Wicklund and her 8-year-old daughter, Shannah, in their Clearview home. He also killed Hendrickson, who had arrived to make dinner for the mother and daughter.
Campbell was quickly identified as a suspect and charged with aggravated murder five days later.
Wicklund, 31, and Hendrickson, 51, were never told of Campbell's release from prison. State officials refused to provide The Times with records showing who recommended Campbell be granted minimum-custody status or on what basis, according to a news story published two weeks after the murders.
Campbell was convicted of aggravated murder, sentenced to die and, after 11 years of appeals, became the last person in Washington to be executed by hanging.
Though Campbell will never be held accountable in court for Seaman's homicide, Norton said he's gratified knowing Campbell "will be held accountable historically." He also praised the efforts of the detectives who investigated Seaman's killing and those who, decades later, submitted forensic evidence for testing.
But it was a legislative change in 2019 — and a decision by a retired Tacoma police detective working for the state attorney general — that ultimately landed the surprising lab report in Norton's inbox.
A break in the case
There are more than 600 unsolved Seattle homicides dating to 1907, and Norton said he's personally looked through roughly 540 case files for homicides committed before 2020, trying to identify which ones are potentially solvable.
He's pretty sure the 1907 case, for instance, was a domestic-violence homicide of a woman whose body washed up on a West Seattle beach in a chest — and that her killer fled to Australia.
No matter how old a homicide is, Norton never uses the term "cold case" because it carries a connotation that an investigation is inactive or that all leads have been exhausted.
"For some, a case is cold if it isn't solved in six months, for others it's cold if it's been a decade," he said. "For me, you can call it cold if it's sitting in a closet and no one's touching it. But don't put that value on my case — I'm hoping to go places with it."
When he first cracked open the case file on Seaman's homicide six years ago, Norton said it immediately struck him as solvable because Seattle Police Department detectives had submitted forensic evidence for testing in 2002. Stubbs, the forensic scientist, was able to generate a male DNA profile but didn't have a name to match the sample.
Further, Norton said he had "incredibly exhaustive" police work to draw on from the initial SPD detectives: Bennie DePalmo, Wayne Dorman and Don Strunk.
Those detectives, who have all since died, learned that a student last saw Seaman working in her studio in the UW architecture building on the night of April 29, 1975. By the time the student passed by again 10 minutes later, Seaman had left for the night.
Then, within the next 40 minutes, a witness saw a male lift a female, who appeared to be passed out or unconscious, into a white vehicle at a nearby intersection.
"Whether or not that was Hallie, I don't know to this day," Norton said.
Early the next morning, Seaman's white Ford Fairlane station wagon was found on fire in the Sodo neighborhood. Her body was found that afternoon in South Lake Union, near Eastlake Avenue East.
It was clear to the detectives that she had been left there, Norton said, but had been killed someplace else. The location was a couple of miles south of Seaman's Eastlake Avenue East apartment.
Detectives painstakingly logged 120 names of possible suspects that arose during the investigation — but Campbell wasn't one of them, Norton said.
One of DePalmo's relatives said the case stuck with the detective long after, given Seaman's youthfulness and the apparent randomness of her killing, Norton recalled.
More than 25 years went by before another detective picked up the case in 2002, submitting forensic evidence that had been preserved from Seaman's autopsy to the State Patrol crime lab, which generated a male DNA profile of the suspected killer. But there were no hits in CODIS, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System that was created in 1998 to share genetic profiles of certain felons in all 50 states.
Seeking new leads, Norton wanted to employ a new strategy called genetic genealogy, using unknown DNA profiles from crime scenes and creating family trees with publicly available DNA profiles to identify possible suspects. But he said the crime lab had used all the available forensic material when generating the suspected killer's genetic profile in 2002, as sometimes happens.
Then in 2019, Washington lawmakers passed new legislation as a continuation of the state's 2015 Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, which required all police agencies to submit untested rape kits, some decades old, to the crime lab for testing.
(This past October, state officials announced the state's backlog of more than 10,000 forensic kits collected from sexual assault survivors had been officially cleared.)
The 2019 legislation also expanded the criteria for whose DNA could be included in CODIS.
Detective Lindsey Wade, a retired Tacoma police homicide detective working for the state Attorney General's Office, decided to submit Campbell's DNA profile, given his notoriety, even though his crimes in Snohomish County predated the creation of CODIS.
Then came the news that DNA had connected Campbell to Seaman's killing.
"Serendipity came together with some great investigative work from '75 and Lindsey Wade thinking out of the box and making some really, really great decisions," Norton said.
Noting that Campbell was only free for about a year between his initial attack on Wicklund in 1974 and his arrest in early 1976, Norton encouraged other police agencies to take a look at their own unsolved cases from that time period to see if it's possible Campbell committed similar crimes in other jurisdictions.
Norton also said he's been in touch with Seaman's family but declined to discuss their conversation. The family has requested privacy.
Asked if solving a decades-old homicide can bring closure to a family, Norton said it's tough to say.
"Is it harder now, that the bandage gets ripped open again after all these years? I don't know. You're cognizant of that when you're reaching out to families and having these discussions," he said. "My guess is that most would like to know, rather than not knowing. However, you're bringing up the worst thing that ever happened to a family and laying it on the table again."
