I’m posting this because things have been going really well for me lately and I need to knock myself down a peg (edit: my mom passed away almost right after I wrote this then I had a miscarriage shortly after that). I worked really hard on my itinerary before I went to Seattle in April 2022 in order not to miss out on anything and unfortunately, I went to the wrong location for this case. The correct address where Lonnie Ree Trumbull and Lisa Eleanore Wick were brutally assaulted is 2415 8th Avenue North in Seattle (98109),’ and I went to 2415 8th Avenue South (98134). I didn’t catch my mistake until I got home when it was obviously too late. This is a case that I slowly became obsessed with while in Washington. I really wish I figured out my mistake in time because I would have gone back.

Roughly eight years before the brutal murder of Lynda Ann Healy, two flight attendants living in a basement apartment in the Queen Anne District of Seattle were brutally assaulted as they lay in their beds in the early morning hours of June 23, 1966; one of them didn’t make it. Trumbull was born on April 4, 1946 in Portland, OR; after graduating from Madison High School in 1964 she attended stewardess school (where she met Wick). Like Lisa, Trumbull was born and raised in Portland and had recently graduated from flight attendant school about a month earlier. At the time of her murder in 1966, Lonnie had just taken a job working for United Airlines and lived with two other flight attendants: Lisa and Joyce Bowe. Thankfully, Joyce was not home at the time of the attacks. At first, it was speculated that the assaults occurred around midnight based on eyewitness testimony of a car speeding away from the scene of the crime around 12:15 AM, however evidence eventually led detectives to believe the attacks may have occurred as late as 3 AM. Additionally, the night of the murders a United Airlines coworker of theirs stated that he called the girls apartment regarding a change in flight plans at roughly 11:45 PM and had spoken to Wick, who said she would pass a message along to Trumbull, who was already asleep. He placed a second call to them the next morning at roughly 5:45 AM, which went unanswered. In a strange twist of fate, former King County Sheriff’s Deputy Terry Allman came forward that he was in a romantic relationship with Trumbull and spent most of the day before her murder at her apartment, leaving around 5:00 PM. The last contact he had with her was later that night when he called her around 10 PM.

The girls were not discovered until around 9:30 AM the following morning when Joyce came home. She discovered the front door was unlocked and the living room light was still on; knowing this was completely out of character for her roommates, she immediately knew something wasn’t right. Standing outside of the apartment door, Bowe cautiously called out to her friends and was met with complete silence. She slowly ventured in and was met with a gruesome sight: both Lisa and Lonnie were viciously attacked, their walls and bedding completely saturated with blood. Joyce dropped everything and ran screaming, ‘my girlfriends are killed, they’re bleeding!’ to their landlord, who immediately called the police. Per the Patreon, ‘hi: I’m Ted,’ Joyce said, ‘I looked at Lonnie and didn’t believe my eyes. Then I started to wake Lisa and she was in the same state.’ Wick was immediately rushed to either King County Hospital or Harborview County Hospital (I’ve seen both in articles), where surgeons performed emergency surgery in order to help ‘relieve pressure on her brain caused by multiple depressed skull fractures.’ Lonnie was determined to already have been deceased; according to medical records neither victim was sexually assaulted. At the time of the attacks, both girls were in bed, wearing their nightclothes, and Lisa was wearing large, bulky curlers in her hair which Doctors theorize may have helped cushion the blows of her assailant which in turn saved her life.

Although the investigation of the Queen Anne apartment resulted in detectives finding a fair amount of evidence, it didn’t result in much helpful information. They determined there were no signs of forced entry (meaning the door had either been unlocked or was poorly made and was easy to pick) although they did find a full palm print and several fingerprints at the scene as well as the murder weapon. In a nearby vacant lot, Seattle Detective Sergeant Herb Arnold found a five pound, one and a half foot long log completely covered in blood that the perpetrator used to bludgeon the girls with. Next to the discarded piece of wood detectives found a white girdle belonging to one of the victims as well as both of their traveling bags (containing only a small amount of change).

Aside from these small personal items that were taken from the victims nothing else of value was taken from the crime scene, which further strengthens the argument that this event was a planned assault (instead of a robbery). George Stoss (another tenant from the girls apartment building) told police he saw a car speed away from the complex at roughly 12:15 AM. He specified that ‘he took off so fast that I wondered if he was going to make the turn.’

Aside from these small personal items that were taken from the victims, nothing of value was missing from the crime scene, which further strengthens the argument that this event was a planned assault (instead of a robbery). Purses of both girls were found but police refused to share where. Another tenant from the girls apartment building named George Stoss told police that he saw a car speed away from the complex at roughly 12:15 AM and ‘at the same time I heard someone scream.’ He specified that ‘he took off so fast that I wondered if he was going to make the turn.’ On June 25, 1966, law enforcement talked to another neighbor who reported she heard the car, where others heard nothing. Police administered a polygraph examination to a 17-year old local boy on June 24, but he passed and was released. On June 29, 1966 at least six additional polygraphs were administered but everyone passed.

On June 24, 1966, former Seattle Police Captain Paul Lee released a statement to the press saying, ‘we don’t have much to go on right now. The girls had been in Seattle for such a limited period of time, we don’t know whether it was an acquaintance or a prowler. But we are not ruling out other motives, such as robbery.’ Due to the sick nature of the heinous crime, King County police felt that the attack was more personal than random and that the assailant most likely knew either one or both of the victims. On June 24, 1966 police developed a ‘vengeance theory,’ and that they have no evidence showing the crime was committed by a ‘casual prowler.’  Using this theory, detectives questioned close to one hundred friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances of all three roommates, even going so far to polygraph a few of the stronger suspects. As Ms. Wick healed from her injuries and got stronger, she regained some of her memory, and on July 15 she helped a sketch artist come up with a composite drawing of the assailant (which unfortunately resulted in no real leads). According to Wick, the assailant was 5’10” tall and weighed about 165 pounds; he was about 30 years old and had thinning blond hair. She could not say for certain whether or not she had ever seen him before, but said she felt she would have been able to ID the man if she ever saw him again. The surviving stewardess told detectives she was awake when the attacker killed her friend then turned on her.

On June 30, a bartender named Homer Sims went to law enforcement and reported that a man ‘about 30 years old’ was in his establishment on June 15 at around 8:00 or 9:00 PM asking directions. He said the individual had a city map and asked how to reach the 2400 block on 8th Avenue, which is the same area where Wick and Trumbull lived. According to Lieutenant Frank Moore, investigators were not overly ‘excited about this lead.’ On July 20, 1966, Lisa Wick was shown pictures of a variety of different suspects, including one of Richard Speck, a suspect in the murders of eight student nurses in Chicago. Nothing ever came of this.

It wasn’t until Bob Keppel of the Kings County Sheriff’s Department started poking around into Bundy’s past that he started piecing together his background. Specifically he noticed some striking similarities between the Wick/Trumbull case and the Chi Omega Sorority attacks that happened in Florida in 1978: both involved a heavy log as the assailants weapon of choice and took place in the middle of the night when the victims were asleep in their beds. We know this was at the end of Bundy’s reign of terror when he was spiraling, but the case of Wick and Trumbull varied drastically from his typical MO: as the assaults happened at a single location, the girls were left behind, there was a survivor, and there were two victims. As a side note, Rita Curran comes to mind when I write this, as she was also killed while in bed and was also left behind (even though I know Bundy was cleared of her murder in 2023 and there was no forestry involved in her tragic death). There is obviously a lot of variation in these characteristics when compared to his later atrocities; I also want to point out that the only other time we know of Bundy taking two victims ‘at once’ was at Lake Sammamish in the summer of 1974 (even though both girls were abducted separately hours apart, they were still taken in the same day). Unless DNA evidence is found hidden in police archives somewhere, we’ll most likely never know what actually happened in the case of Lonnie Trumbull and Lisa Wick. There is also another unconfirmed TB case involving two victims: the 1969 Garden State Parkway murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis, but at this time his involvement is purely speculative.

On September 3, 1966, Wick was discharged from Harborview and went home to her family in Portland, Oregon. That October she returned to work at United Airlines and got married in 1967; Joyce Bowe served as maid of honor and several members of the Seattle police department attended the wedding. Asked if she lived her life in fear after the attack, Wick said ‘the fear that I have is not an ‘afraid’ fear. It’s just something that happened and that shouldn’t have happened.’ Ted denied any involvement in the assaults (because he told the truth so often), however Wick confided in Bundy bff Ann Rule that she felt he was her attacker and that his eyes ‘deeply disturbed her.’ Lisa and her husband divorced in May 1970 on the grounds of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’; she got married for a second time in 1976.

In 1966 at the time of the attacks, Ted Bundy was a 19 year old University of Washington student living at his parents’ house on North Skyline Drive in Tacoma, WA. I know first hand walking around Tacoma and Seattle for days on end that they are about an hour apart and are not nearly as close as you’d think. Shortly before the murders in April 1966 Ted sold his first vehicle, a 1933 Plymouth Coupe and bought a 1958 VW Bug. It’s widely known that Bundy didn’t officially begin his crime spree until the brutal assault of Karen Sparks in 1974 (who was also attacked as she slept in her bed), however most true crime scholars agree he is a strong suspect in the disappearance of five year old Ann Marie Burr when Ted was only 14 years old on August 31, 1961. He denied involvement in both Burr and Trumbulls murders. It wasn’t until Bundy was arrested that investigators compared his fingerprints to those discovered at the site of the Trumbulls murder and determined they were not a match. However, crime scenes in the 1960’s were far less ‘secure’ than they are now and there is a chance the prints found belonged to someone else not involved with law enforcement (supposedly there was even a photographer from the local newspaper that was allowed on the scene). As recently as 2018 Washington state investigators re-examined DNA left behind at the crime scene and attempted to link it to Bundy’s, however no match has ever successfully been made. About the Wick/Trumbull case, Bundy researcher Tiffany Jean wrote on her ‘hi: I’m Ted’ Patreon site that: ’notably, in his death row conversations with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Bundy did mention a possible early assault on a woman with a piece of lumber, but the scenario he described was much different from the 1966 crime. In his third-person, pseudo-confession as recorded in Conversations with a Killer, Bundy said: ‘on one particular occasion, he saw a woman park her car and walk up to her door and fumble for her keys. He walked up behind her and struck her with a… a piece of wood he was carrying. And she fell down and began screaming, and he panicked and ran. What he had done terrified him.’

Aside from Bundy there are a few other suspects in the attack of Lisa Wick and the murder of Lonnie Trumbull, including a grocery store clerk who had an unreturned crush on Lonnie and a used car salesman who stood accused of raping an 8 year old child. It is also worth mentioning that the apartment owners son committed suicide only a few months after the assaults and newspaper clippings about the case were found left behind in his belongings. Was he just a concerned citizen interested in a crime that took place on his fathers property, or was he connected to it in some way? There is another possible suspect named Mike Boylan: in the same police report that mentions the used car salesman and the grocery clerk is the sentence: ‘I still say Mike Boylan did it!!’ That’s it, there is no elaboration as to who exactly Mr. Boylan was or what the context. Per ‘hi: I’m Ted,’ the only Michael Boylan on public record listed as living in the Seattle area in 1966 was an Irish immigrant who worked as a Seattle-Tacoma Airport police officer who later went on to work for the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Department, and eventually the Issaquah Police Department. In 1966, Boylan lived within walking distance to Wick and Trumbulls Queen Anne basement apartment. There is obviously more to this than what I’m saying here, and maybe one day I’ll delve into it deeper but I’m writing a blog about Ted Bundy, not Mike Boylan.

I assumed that at the time of the attacks Bundy worked at the nearby Safeway in Seattle that the girls were known to shop at (it’s rumored that’s where he first spotted them), however it was determined he didn’t start his employment there until April 12, 1968. Per the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ in 1966 Bundy worked a summer job at ‘Tacoma City Lights‘ while saving up for his first year at the University of Washington in Seattle (he dropped out of the University of Puget Sound after only a year). I never heard of this employer before, and according to its Wikipedia page, Tacoma City Light was opened in 1893 when the citizens of Tacoma voted to buy the privately owned Tacoma Light & Water Company to ensure its safety and longevity.

Despite a $10,000 reward offered by United Airlines for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assailant of Lisa Wick and the murderer of Lonnie Trumbull, no arrests have ever been made. The case remains unsolved to this day.

Works Cited:
McFadden, Casper. ‘Bundy: Lonnie Trumbull (Suspected).’January 12, 2021.Retrieved May 4, 2022 from http://www.themorbidlibrary.coma
Jean, Tiffany. ‘The Unconfirmed Cases: Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull, 1966.’ November 10, 2019. Retrieved May 4, 2022 from hiimted.blog.