42| Sinister Suspicion: Jane Constantino
By now, most people have been asked the question man or bear? when You’re alone and walking in a park which would you rather come across? Or better yet which one would you rather your daughter encounter while she is by herself?
Many say bear, for a multitude of reasons. a bear can kill you a bear can harm you a bear can leave you with life altering injuries that will require extensive medical care and leave you with the question why did this happen to me?
And man can do the same. The difference between man and bear being as that woman recovers and then finds herself alone. She will again encounter strange men. We recognize not all men, not even the majority of men, have ill intentions.
But her heart will still race, her shoulders will tense, and a scream will start to bubble up in her throat at the idea that this could happen again.
And because of that, we often feel safer in parks. Especially parks that are frequented by many visitors, And comforted by the fact that we are not alone on these trails. That if something happens, she can scream and others will hear her.
But human predators can be vile and vicious, and one woman with a premonition that she would die young herself, falls silent.
Welcome back to Tragedy with a View, I am your host , Kayla and and Caitlin is back for this true crime episode.
Today we are going to Olympic National Park which is located in The far north west of Washington state. Olympic national park holds almost a million acres of protected wilderness and indigenous history. Encompasses in this area are vast changes from ocean coast line to glacier capped mountain, an old growth forest and a temperate rainforest. The old growth forest in Olympic National Park is as old as 1,000 years.
The glaciers receded from the area roughly 10,000 years ago and as it receded, slowly, plant and animal waste began to feed the soils which allowed the climate and ecosystem here to support the growth and development of massive trees.
As the glaciers left, it allowed the space for foliage to flourish an flowers of every color bloom in the spring. Pika, fox, coyotes, bear, beavers, and elk and cougars are all found in the park, and the diverse landscape also allows for a variety of snakes, salamanders and bugs to thrive.
Olympic national park was established in 1938 under president franklin Roosevelt’s guide and has been in the top 10 most visited national parks For several years.
There are 3 separate ecosystems within the park’s boundaries, including the temperate rainforest which receives 150 inches of rain each year. The Hoh rainforest is located on the west side of the park. On the east side is the old growth forest, and then there is, of course, the pacific coastline.
The park has 32 named glaciers, and 11 major rivers flowing through it, along with alpine meadows, waterfalls, hot springs, tide pools, sandy beaches and off shore erosion formed sea stacks.
Hurricane ridge, hoh rainforest, ruby beach, and lake crescent are all major highlights of the area, but one should not forget about cape alava(Ah- lava).
Cape Alava is the westernmost point of the continental United States, and is located in the ozette Indian reservation inside of Olympic national park.
From the cape, you will see spectacular ocean views, where if you are lucky, both orca whales and gray whales frequent while migrating to or from the bearing sea. With binoculars you might also find humpback, fin, sperm and blue whales. River otters and sea otters along with California sea lions and harbor seals also are a common sight.
And when the tide goes out, or during low tide, the water recedes a far distance from the where it typically is. Leaving large rocks and pools of water behind and creating a whole different experience than if you are there during high tide.
You can only reach this point by hiking the ozette triangle loop. This loop is also known as the The Cape Alava Loop and it is actually two trails connecting to make one. The first winds you through the forest and then the other takes you out to the beach. the Cape Alava Trail out to the beach and back is a 6.2 mile or 10km hike, or you can also continue south along the beach for a ways to find the Sand Point Trail for a 9.4 mile or 15km loop style trail.
In 1977, Jane Constantino is a vibrant and adventurous 28 year old. She was blonde and athletic, and kind, and while she often joked that she had no fears the reality was that anything that did scare her she would try to conquer.
Jane grew up in Long Island and attended Fordham University, which is located in New York City. She then worked as a social worker for a few years in the city, but very quickly figured out that cities felt confining and was looking for an outlet to get her outdoors.
Jane had previously met and married a man while she was in Europe and moved to Colorado with him. However, after two years, their marriage would fall apart, but because she loves the Colorado she stayed in the Denver area.
Jane often worked extremely hard as a waitress to save money for her summer adventures and was often found working seven days a week so that way she would be able to take months off at a time in the summers where she would then drive around in a old Volkswagen bug to get her anywhere she wanted to go.
Having the premonition she would die young, Jane set out to accomplish all of her goals and explore the incredible highs as well as the horrendous lows that life had to offer.
Jane and her climbing partner, Ralph Hill were in Grand Teton National Park climbing Petzoldt Ridge when a thunderstorm rolled in. If you have listened to the two part Dancing with Death episodes, you already know what is coming next.
This ridge is a classic for climbers, and from the top of this ridge, you have multiple options to summit Grand Teton, also known as the Grand, stands 13,776 feet or 4199 meters tall.
They didn’t have any form of shelter to hide in and wait out the storm. So the pair would have to continue climbing and get to the safest place they could - which was at the top of the lower ridge.
They climbed through rain, hail and snow, not taking any of their grip of footholds for granted. Once they reached the top of the lower ridge, they paused here to wait for the storm to pass. And it would be here that tragedy would strike.
At about 12:30pm lightning struck the peak of the Grand, and Jane and Ralph felt the current as it passed from the rock and into their bodies. The current was strong and caused both of them burns, but they were alive. for about an hour both Jane and Ralph were unable to help themselves.
Finally, they bit the bullet and wrapped each others burns, climbed over Exum ridge, and then rappelled down, where they would finally arrive at the lower saddle at about 8:30pm. Here, they spent the night before finally making the several mile hike to the Jenny Lake rangers station.
Rangers, Dave Carman and Jan Boyle noted that Jane had burns from the top of her shoulder down to her elbow on her right arm as well as burns across her back and onto her left arm. The burns on her right arm, thought, were the most severe and were labeled as 3rd degree burns in places, and the socks inside her boots had disintegrated due to the lightning strike.
This experience was not the beginning nor the end of close calls that Jane would experience in her life.
Jane had also nearly drowned while in a river in the Katmai National Park area of Alaska. she had also Slipped and almost fell from a mountain ridge, breaking her ankle and receiving a concussion, when she was climbing a mountain in Yosemite national park.
Other times she had flawless adventures such as in 1979 she climbed Mount Baker and then Mount Saint Helens within a nine day period, missing the 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption by just a few months.
She biked to Mexico From Washington, she then biked alone from Nova Scotia to New York, where she ended up in the hospital for several days after being hit by a truck.
And then in 1980 Jane had decided that she was going to take her biggest adventure yet. Planning her route she and her brother were going to bicycle from Denver to New York City.
though this trip went flawlessly once she flew back to Colorado. She felt like she wasn’t done so this time she decided to go to the farthest West shore of the continental US, so she could dip her bicycle wheels into the ocean.
And so off she sets to bike to Washington. Everything was going smooth and once she reached the Ozette Indian Reservation, on July 23, 1979, she decided to attend an archeology presentation and this would be the last time that Jane would have smooth sailing, so to speak, on her adventures.
After the presentation, Jane set off down the cape alava loop trail heading toward Cape Alava.
At about 3pm a group of hikers were on the same trail, also heading toward the ocean. As they came around a corner on the trail, they saw a woman laying face down. They were about a quarter mile from the ocean.
Picking up their pace to assist the fainted woman, they very quickly realized that there was a much larger problem when they found her shirt was drenched with bright red blood.
This group immediately starts trying to determine if Jane was still alive, but they were unable to find a pulse or determine if she was still taking any breaths.
As members of the group are trying to care for Jane, another member runs to the closest payphone and calls the police and because of the nature of the crime three separate agencies respond.
These agencies are clallam county sheriffs deputies, tribal police from the Ozette Indian reservation and finally Rangers from the US park service.
Officer were on the scene within minutes and this was done because the Coast Guard used a helicopter to pick up officers and detectives from clallam county sheriffs office and brought them to the beach where again Jane was laying roughly a quarter mile away from.
Park Rangers, Gordon Boyd, and Steve Underwood along with deputy Michael Lenihan were the first to observe the crime scene and a pretty quickly determined that jane had clearly died from multiple stab to the chest, that this clearly was not an accident, and that she likely died quickly.
They then carefully went through her backpack and found her drivers license, which identified her as Jane Constantino, 32 years old.
This attack appeared to be an intend homicide as Jane was fully clothed, her clothing had not been rearranged at all, and there was no signs that she had been sexually assaulted before, during or after the attack.
As more personnel arrived on scene, the investigators started to organize a grid search of the park starting in the area that they found Jane in.
There was some timing concerns because even though Jane was discovered very quickly and officers were able to respond within minutes, Olympic national Park is ginormous, and it is also very dense, and they feared that the person they were looking for would be able to quietly slip away unnoticed.
The detective started putting together what they assumed the killer would either look like or be like. And because of the depths of the wounds and angle of the wounds, they determined that the killer must be a man, he must Tall and he either had to be a very strong individual or he was a very large individual. In fact, the 6 stab wounds in Jane’s chest were so deep that the coroner would report that the person who dealt the blows would have had to have been of above average strength.
As the police began to question people as they were found and escorted from the park, many recalled seeing Jane, and that she was being followed by a big, bulky man who had black hair and was wearing a cowboy hat, a purple shirt and cowboy boots.
In fact, another woman told police she was approached by the same man and how he was acting raised the hair in the back of her neck. She told them the story about how a weird man started to follow her, but no matter how quickly she walked, it seemed like he was just catching up to her faster and faster.
Before she was able to reach the beach, he had caught up to her and mentioned that she was beautiful and that he was a photographer for a Playboy and he was offering her $50 to pose for him naked.
But the way that he was handling himself, coupled with the fact that he didn’t have a camera or a camera bag with him made this woman extremely uneasy, and so she told him that he needed to leave her alone and go away.
It was at that moment that another woman came around a turn on the trail, caught the attention of this man, and he simply just stared at her before he turned and started to follow her down the trail. This woman had a bike with her.
Once his attention was no longer on her, this other woman ran away and didn’t think much of anything being wrong since as she moved away from the man she didn’t hear any screaming or yelling or commotion that would indicate they’re being a problem.
She described this man as “really big probably over 6 feet and kind of blubbery around the middle not real clean. He was wearing a purple shirt and cowboy hat.” She also mentioned that he might’ve been in his late 30s to early 40s age range.
It was at this point in the retelling that she started to break down and worry that her leaving led to Jane’s death, and she said if I stayed, maybe I could’ve helped her maybe the two of us could have stopped him.
The officer who interviewed her very generously pointed out that staying with her could have led to the both of them being killed.
In addition to this, it was later discovered that Dale also stalked one of the archaeologist for the Ozette reservation, Stephanie Ludwig, while she was on the beach and she ended up going into the tide because she noticed that he wasn’t following her into the water. Stephanie was able to get away from him by doing this because he would later say that he was wearing cowboy boots and didn’t want to get the leather wet.
Then, as officers were talking to other groups of hikers, they learned that a man had been seen by two hikers who barely stepped off the path in time before this man knocked into them. They mentioned that he seemed like he was in a hurry and if they hadn’t stepped out of the way, that he would have pushed them out of his way.
He was wearing a purple shirt and he had dark red stains going down the front of it. at the time they didn’t think much of the stains, assuming that he had been eating berries and just wiped his hands on his shirt.
As Park Rangers Boyd and Underwood and deputy Lenihan walked down the trail towards the beach and searched for the man that matched this description that they had now heard multiple times, they noticed a man. He was Burley. He was wearing a black cowboy hat and had on a soaking wet, purple shirt. But this purple shirt didn’t have any stains on it whatsoever.
Quickly intervening the Rangers and deputy searched him. Deputy Lenihan found a hunting knife that was tucked into his belt and then several lengths of rope that came from his pockets. One of the Rangers found his wallet and pulled out his drivers license and found that this man was Dale Harrison. He was 37 years old and from orthello Washington.
They immediately arrested him under the suspicion of murder and once more questions were asked by FBI special agent, Paul Mack, Dale insisted that he was not the one who murdered Jane.
Rather, he was a witness. he saw the stabbing by another man, who had taken Dale’s knife, and he then rushed to help Jane and found that she had already died. It was when he noticed that he had blood on his shirt that he panicked, first trying to run it off and only spreading it more.
and then and idea came to him. So he ran to the ocean to wash the blood off of his shirt so that way he wouldn’t be automatically labeled as a killer, especially because he had a background.
When Special Agent Mack searched his name, Dale was not on any wanted lists. However, he did have multiple sex related charges filed against him almost two decades prior. Dale had been convicted for molesting two young girls in 1962, when he was 19 years old.
During this attack he had used a knife to threaten the two girls. He served two years and was released on parol in 1965. Since then, he had had a seemingly clean history.
Dale had gotten married, he and his wife had had two children and he had a good job working for a labor company as a forklift operator.
But, Dales description matched multiple peoples details of what they saw in the park and the uneasiness he caused in his behavior. The hunting knife was shown to match the stab wounds in Jane’s chest and once tests were ran on Dale’s shirt, they found that there were traces of human blood that matched Jane’s genotype still imbedded in the fibers.
Blood genotype is in short the genetic makeup of your blood- it is not blood type- but there are 5 genotypes and these types can produce properly shaped and functioning blood cells, or abnormalities in the blood cells that affects its shape and ability to flow in a proper manner.
From my understanding being able to match blood type is like a step closer than matching genotype.
Dale was arrested and held on $100,000.00 bail.
The investigators would end up talking to a gentleman who claimed to be one of Dales best friends. He talked about how Dale had been obsessing for a year an a half about a very detailed plan he had.
Dale, one night, excitedly told his friend about the idea of finding a woman alone in the woods - they would be so far away from anything else, that of course this woman would be scared and helpless. Dale would describe how he would use the rope to tie up the woman so she couldn’t escape, use the knife as a way to coerce her into obeying him, while he made her his sex slave. Dale even asked his friend to join him.
Dale would go on trial in November of 1980 for his crimes against Jane, and a jury found him guilty. His attorney, Dan Dubinsky, tried to argue that Dale was mentally ill. But judge Donald Voorhees denied this on December 5, 1980, denying Dale the potential to be subject to a psychiatric study - which if found that he was mentally ill could have allowed him for a chance at early parol. With this not being the case though, Dale was sentenced to life in prison.
Generally speaking, life imprisonment means that the person convicted will spend the rest of their life in prison. There would need to be a minimum number of years defined in the ruling, in which at that point if the person is eligible, they could file for parol. I couldn’t find a minimum term or if he was sentenced with or without parol. Sources on this case were really hard to find.
This was the very first reported homicide in Olympic national Park, and I think that this is part of the reason why sources were hard to find, because you want public parks to be a safe place.
*warning: we discuss sex crimes and murder in this episode.
In 1979, a gruesome and heinous crime is committed against a woman, who was simply trying to live her life to the fullest. Olympic National Park would host is very first murder inside park bounds, and thankfully, the violent offender would be captured quickly.
Of course we want to consider national parks a safe place and think that if anything’s going to happen, it would be more nature related than that of another human being coming into this beautiful space and shrouded it with evil.
Join Kayla and Caitlin as they discuss this case, the crime and get slightly off topic on consent.
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Sources:
AAC, NPS History, “A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases” Volume 6 by Ann Rule
