On the evening before Thanksgiving, November 27, 1974, in Burien, Washington, 19-year-old Vonnie Stuth, a White female, was at home alone after her husband, Todd, left for his swing shift job. The young newlywed had spoken to her sister earlier in the evening and was planning to bring a Jell-O salad to the family's holiday gathering the next day. However, when Todd returned to their basement apartment after midnight, he found the television and lights on, but his wife was gone.
Initially, Vonnie's disappearance was treated as a missing person case. Investigators had a vague lead about a man from across the street who had offered her a dog. In the early stages of the investigation, there was speculation that her case might be connected to the string of disappearances of young women in the Seattle area at the time, which were later attributed to Ted Bundy. However, detectives were unable to establish any link between Vonnie and Bundy.
Several months later, a man named Gary Addison Taylor, a former neighbor of the Stuths, was arrested in Houston, Texas, for a series of violent crimes. During his interrogation, Taylor confessed to multiple murders, including that of Vonnie Stuth. He revealed that he had abducted her from her Burien home. His confession led authorities to a shallow grave near a house he had recently occupied in Enumclaw, where they found Vonnie's remains. It was reported that she had been shot twice in the head in a desperate attempt to escape her killer. Taylor, who had a history of violent crimes and was an escaped mental patient from Michigan, had slipped through the cracks of the justice system, allowing him to be free to commit further atrocities.
Following his confession in Texas, Gary Addison Taylor was extradited to Washington and charged with the first-degree murder of Vonnie Stuth. On April 30, 1978, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder as part of an agreement that he would not be prosecuted for his crimes in Texas and Michigan. A Washington state parole board sentenced him to a minimum of ninety years in prison. Years later, a victim impact statement from one of Vonnie's sisters contributed to the denial of his parole, with his next eligibility date set for 2035, when he would be 100 years old.
