Lynne Carol Tuski, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Washington, was looking forward to celebrating her 21st birthday with her parents. That celebration would never happen. On the evening of Friday, January 24, 1969, her life was violently stolen in a department store parking lot in Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle, Washington. She was the third and final proven victim of a man who would later be identified as Washington's first known serial killer.
That evening, Lynne
finished her shift at the Sears store on Aurora Avenue and walked toward her car, which was parked about 300 feet from the entrance. A coworker walked with her part of the way before turning back to the store for a forgotten item. It was in those few moments of solitude, around 7:15 p.m., that Lynne was abducted. When she failed to return home, her worried father drove to the Sears parking lot to search for her, but his daughter was gone. Her disappearance came just three weeks after another young woman, 21-year-old Mary Bjornson, had vanished from her Seattle apartment.
The mystery of what happened to Lynne Tuski and Mary Bjornson began to unravel in February 1969, through a separate, violent crime. A young woman who had been kidnapped and held captive for days managed to escape from a man named John Dwight Canaday, a 24-year-old Vietnam veteran and recently divorced father of two. His arrest for that kidnapping put him on law enforcement's radar. While in custody for a series of assaults and rapes, Canaday eventually confessed to the murders of the two missing women.
In March 1969, Canaday led investigators to the remote, snow-covered locations where he had left his victims. On March 13, Lynne’s body was discovered beside a forest access road near Index, in Snohomish County. She had been raped and strangled. A few days later, after further confessions, Canaday guided police to the body of Mary Bjornson in the same desolate area. He admitted he had abducted Lynne from the Sears parking lot, just as he had lured Mary from her apartment weeks earlier with a story about car trouble before raping and strangling her.
Canaday was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, as well as rape, attempted rape, kidnapping, and assault. At his trial, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but a jury found him guilty on all counts after deliberating for only two hours. He was sentenced to death for the murders of Lynne Tuski and Mary Bjornson. However, in 1972, his sentence was commuted to life in prison after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the death penalty in several states, including Washington.
For decades, Canaday remained in prison, serving two consecutive life sentences. But the full scope of his violence was not yet known. In 2002, investigators with a new "cold case" squad revisited the unsolved 1968 murder of 16-year-old Sandra Bowman, a pregnant newlywed who had been bound and stabbed 60 times in her Ballard apartment. Using modern DNA technology, forensic scientists matched evidence from the scene to John Dwight Canaday. When confronted in prison, Canaday confessed to killing Sandra as well, admitting he had randomly knocked on her door. In 2004, he pleaded guilty and received a third consecutive life sentence.
John Dwight Canaday, the man responsible for ending the lives of Lynne Tuski and two other young women, died of natural causes in his cell at Clallam Bay Corrections Center on December 26, 2012. He was 68 years old. He left behind a legacy of terror and families shattered by loss, including the family of a bright University of Washington student who was just on her way home from work.
