Vicious. Kevin O'Brien

but kept unraveling the scarf—careful not to scratch the baby’s cheek with her fingernails. His screams became louder, and he wiggled fiercely. “What in the world?” she muttered. To her horror, Hannah found part of the silky material crammed into the baby’s little mouth. She pulled out the makeshift gag, partially stained with his saliva and tears.

      The little boy gasped, then let go an ear-piercing scream. He trembled in his father’s arms. The man kept hugging him and kissing his forehead.

      “Do you know whose this is?” Hannah asked, showing him the green silk scarf. She had to shout over the baby’s cries.

      “That’s his mother’s,” the man replied, dazed. He rocked the baby in an effort to calm him down. “She—she had it on when she left the house earlier. But she—she wouldn’t have done that to him, not Pam. She’s a good mother, she—”

      Hannah gazed at him and shook her head.

      The man seemed to choke on those words, She’s a good mother. Tears came to his eyes as he stared at the frayed stuffed giraffe in his son’s grasp. “Oh, my God, that’s not his…. It’s not his toy…. Oh, Jesus, this isn’t happening….”

      In horror and disgust, he knocked the stuffed animal out of the boy’s hand. The child shrieked even louder, and his father held him against his chest. He anxiously glanced at the dark woods around them. “Pam?” he screamed. “Sweetheart? Pam?”

      The green scarf slipped out of Hannah’s grasp. Numbly, she stepped back and bumped into a tree. But she barely felt it. She couldn’t feel anything beyond the terrible sensation in her gut.

      Most everyone in the Seattle area knew about the string of recent murders. Three women had disappeared in the last few months. Their ages varied, but they had one thing in common. They were all mothers, each one abducted in front of her son. In what was becoming an eerie calling card, their abductor always left behind a used toy for the child.

      And each of the mothers was later found dead.

      The local TV and newspapers had given this killer a name: Mama’s Boy.

      People in the Seattle area were scared—especially women with young sons. But maybe Andy’s mother hadn’t been thinking when she’d taken her baby for a walk after dark. Didn’t her husband say they’d been quarreling? In the heat of anger, she must have grabbed her son and left the house in a hurry.

      “Pam?” the man screamed over his son’s wailing. He kept rocking the baby in his arms. “Honey, can you hear me? Pam? Sweetheart…”

      Hannah stood with her back against the tree. She listened to the man crying out and the baby’s screaming. She felt sick to her stomach. A cool wind whipped through her. Leaves scattered. Shuddering, Hannah stared down at the frayed, stuffed yellow giraffe, leaning against one of the wheels of the child’s empty stroller.

      Hannah had an awful feeling that no matter how many times this man called out for her, Andy’s mother would never answer him.

      Two days later, someone found Andy’s mother. The story made the front page of The Seattle Times on April 5, 1998:

      FOURTH VICTIM DISCOVERED IN ‘MOTHER’ KILLINGS

      ‘Mama’s Boy’ Continues to Elude Police

      LATEST CASUALTY LEFT BEHIND AN INFANT SON

      SEATTLE—An intense, 36-hour search for a missing Seattle woman, Pamela Baiter Milford, 31, ended early Friday morning, when workers found her body partially buried under a tarp at a Greenwood area construction site. According to sources at the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the victim had been beaten and strangled to death at least 24 hours before her body was discovered.

      Seattle Police Detective Keith Stuckly, on a special task force for homicide investigation, said: “Ms. Milford’s death has all the earmarks of another Mama’s Boy killing. The circumstances of her disappearance and death all but confirm it.”

      The elusive serial killer dubbed “Mama’s Boy” is believed to be responsible for at least three other Seattle-area murders in the last eight months. Each victim was abducted in front of her son and later found beaten and strangled to death.

      Milford was last seen with her only child, a 10-month-old boy, around 6 p.m. Wednesday in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park, four blocks from her home….

      The article went on to explain about the three others before Andy’s mother.

      On November 8, 1997, an intruder attacked the first victim, Sarah Edgecombe, twenty-four, in her home in Auburn while she was giving her three-year-old son a bath. Her husband, Kyle, had stepped out for cigarettes. Returning home twenty minutes later, he discovered the traumatized young boy, shivering in the cold tub. In the boy’s bedroom, on his pillow, Kyle found a dilapidated teddy bear. Hikers spotted Sarah’s remains three days later in the woods at Seattle’s Discovery Park. Unfortunately, woodland scavengers had found her first. Police had to scour nearly a mile of the forest before they found all of her, and even then, it was mostly bones, picked near-clean. Sarah was the only one who had been dismembered.

      After that, it seemed Mama’s Boy wanted his victims to be discovered—eventually.

      Anita Breckinridge, forty-three, disappeared on December 29, 1997, in a Safeway supermarket two miles from her Lynnwood home, leaving her four-year-old son in the shopping cart’s child seat. The abandoned boy’s screams resonated through the store for ten minutes. In the cart, a store employee found an old Raggedy Andy doll. The boy’s father confirmed that it didn’t belong to his son. The following morning, a jogger noticed Anita’s nude corpse in a ditch near the Burke-Gilman Trail by Lake Union in Seattle. The jogger called 911 from her cell phone. “For a moment, when I saw that pale thing lying there in the gully, I thought it was a dead deer,” she said.

      With his learner’s permit in his back pocket, fifteen-year-old Greg Sherwood drove his mother, Lila, forty-nine, to China Gardens in Ballard on March 22, 1998. It was raining that night. Greg parked in an alley behind the restaurant. He left the motor running and his mother in the front seat while he dashed into the restaurant to pick up their carryout order. Greg returned five minutes later with two bags of Chinese food. He found the car’s passenger door open, and the windshield wipers still moving and squeaking. One of his mother’s shoes was in a puddle by that door. In the passenger seat was an old G.I. Joe doll. Lila Sherwood’s body was discovered in a Dumpster behind a Texaco station in Issaquah the following morning.

      The toys Mama’s Boy left behind were all used, slightly damaged, and untraceable.

      Psychologists on the case speculated that the killer’s mother must have deserted him, and there was probably abuse, too. It would explain why this killer was acting out. Typically, they would have expected all of the victims’ children to have been the same specific age—the age the killer might have been when abandoned by his mother, or when he might have experienced a severe trauma.

      But that just didn’t apply to Mama’s Boy—and his killing pattern. The oldest surviving child was fifteen, and the youngest, Andy Milford, was ten months old.

      No one saw the man who had abducted Andy’s mother in the park that night.

      A twenty-seven-year-old construction worker, Chad Schlund, was the one who had found her. The building site was for a proposed forty-unit luxury condominium, Greenlake Manor. A two-story-deep, giant hole had been excavated for the basement and underground garage. A black tarp covered most of the vast crater, and that was where Chad Schlund wandered off from his coworkers to have a cigarette break. The ground beneath the tarp was hard and flat. So when Chad stepped on something soft and mushy beneath the black plastic sheeting, he balked. He noticed a bulky lump in the tarp and figured a large raccoon or dog must have made its way under that plastic sheet and suffocated.

      Chad almost moved on. He had only a few minutes left of his break. Already one of the tall cranes began to sweep across the grey horizon again, and his coworkers were lumbering back to their workstations. Chad figured he had time for only half a cigarette