The cover sheet says: “Protect us, please.”
Page two of the fax reads: “Eli, I send all of this to you with a
mother’s sincerity and honor and greatest love ever one can have for
her son no matter what.” Page three: The mother, Kathleen Territo,
tells me about her son’s “awful addictions” and says that at the very
least he’s “safe now, free.”
Page four: The toxicology report for William F. Ball, Territo’s son,
who was stabbed to death on February 21, just after midnight, on the
sidewalk of a mostly empty street in North Seattle.
The toxicology report says that Ball’s blood, tested after he was
killed, showed a level of alcohol intoxication that would have caused
most people to pass out. It recounts the additional presence in his
blood of caffeine, nicotine, and hydrocodone, the chemical name for the
substance commonly sold as Vicodin. In Ball’s urine: opiates. His
mother believes this was from the methadone he was taking for heroin
addiction.
Page five: The autopsy report. “The cause of death of this
30-year-old man is a single stab wound of the chest, injuring the
heart.”
William F. Ball had a relatively short life, and during it he both
suffered and caused tremendous pain. He was loved by his friends and
family. He was feared by victims of his rage and violence. He had been
in and out of jail. He had been addicted to drugs and alcohol. He had
been, for quite a long time, mentally unstable. His mother told me over
the phone that she wasn’t sure what descriptor to use. Perhaps bipolar.
Perhaps schizophrenic.
“When he was on medication, he was okay,” she said. “When he wasn’t,
he was not okay.”
Ball had hoped to become a respected artist. Instead, in January, he
nearly became infamous for a crime he didn’t commit—the slaying
of Shannon Harps, a 31-year-old woman who was stabbed to death outside
of her Capitol Hill apartment on New Year’s Eve.
Ball was eventually cleared of the crime when DNA evidence linked
the killing to another man. Then, a month later, Ball himself was
stabbed to death.
When Ball died, he was dressed warmly: a gray jacket, a gray-striped
pullover shirt, and a white sleeveless T-shirt. Also: jeans, secured
with a brown belt, worn over thermal long johns. On his feet: white and
gray socks. Almost all of these items, the report says, are now either
completely soaked or partially soiled with blood—except, it
appears, the white and gray socks.
In Ball’s pockets and among his personal effects, the random
detritus of a troubled man. From his inner jacket pocket: a package of
candy, a pair of eyeglasses, and a white metal bracelet. From an outer
jacket pocket: a bottle of hydrocodone (60 tablets prescribed to him in
January, with 57 remaining), a blood-covered piece of paper, and three
“portions of cigarettes.”
In two bags from Harborview Medical Center, where Ball was
pronounced dead, more possessions: a key chain with several keys; a
mental-health pamphlet from the Washington State Department of Social
and Health Services; another pamphlet titled “Mental Health Ombuds
Service”; a card reading, “Crisis Clinical”; a package of Eclipse gum;
and a pill bottle with a label indicating that its original use was as
a container for trazodone, an antidepressant that was prescribed to
Ball in December. The bottle contained pills of many different shapes
and colors.
There is also, in one of the Harborview bags, a brown wallet holding
Ball’s Washington State ID, a $20 bill, nine quarters, one dime, and
several Liberty Bell postage stamps.
“Removed from the right ring finger are two band rings, one yellow
metal, one white metal. Removed from the right wrist is a white metal
bracelet with a dragon design.”
Ball’s death is a story that resists narrative and
sense-making. Seattle police detective Cloyd Steiger, who ended up
investigating both the Harps murder and the Ball murder, said he was
surprised and not surprised when he went to Harborview one night,
lifted the sheet from a recently deceased murder victim, and saw the
man he’d been questioning just the previous month about the murder of
Harps.
“I went, ‘Holy shit, this is William Ball,'” Steiger told me, and
then he added: “I wasn’t surprised that he would die this way, knowing
what I know about him.”
Lack of surprise from a homicide detective looking down on a dead
body is not, however, an exploration of the forces that created the
dead body. Nor is it an interior glimpse of the man who found himself
in front of the knife—the kind of glimpse that people, hoping to
gather up some useful cautionary tale out of the painful shards of
tragedy, often crave as they try to comprehend why others meet such
brutal ends. It’s a craving that, fairly or unfairly, tends to be far
more acute when the murder of the individual elicits surprise and
shock, the opposite of Steiger’s reaction to Ball’s death.
This is because a surprising murder makes everyone feel unsafe. It
leads to the frightening thought: It could have been me. It causes
people to want to know more in an attempt to perhaps protect themselves
from the same fate.
An unsurprising murder? Well, it’s hard to convince the general
public that there is much protective value to them in reading about an
unsurprising murder. They are not surprised. Therefore, they feel, they
are not at risk. It could never have been them. Nothing helpful
here.
Ball had hoped to be posthumously helpful. Perhaps sensing he was on
a dangerous trajectory, he once gave his mother instructions on what to
do if he died before her. “I want them to please study my brain,” he
told her. He imagined that the study of his mind, which had so often
failed him, could somehow be of service to others.
“Maybe if they found out what was wrong with him, then they could
help other people,” his mother explains.
Unlike the murder of William
F. Ball, the murder of Shannon
Harps horrified the public, and therefore demanded both a clear
narrative and a fast, firm response. A young woman who worked as a
Sierra Club organizer, Harps was excited about her new place on Capitol
Hill and had a life full of friends and opportunity ahead of her. She
had been stabbed, repeatedly, for no apparent reason, as she tried to
enter her building on New Year’s Eve, then left to die.
Under pressure to find a suspect—to offer some sort of
explanation for this seemingly random and exceptionally brutal
crime—the Seattle police briefly, and mistakenly, took Ball into
custody and investigated him as a “person of interest” in the slaying.
It was an error and an investigative dead end, but given Ball’s
history, it’s not surprising that someone who knew about him called the
police and anonymously suggested they bring him in for questioning.
On paper, Ball was a man who had a record of violence and threats
against women, who lived in a run-down Capitol Hill apartment building
on a block full of squalid halfway houses, and who bore a loose
similarity to the police department’s sketch of a person seen running
away from the scene of the Harps murder—”a bearded man in a
stocking cap.”
Ball’s mother doesn’t try to whitewash her son’s criminal
history.
“Some of these people, maybe they can’t help the crime,” she tells
me. “Maybe they really, really, truly can’t help it. And that’s a
possibility with my son.”
At the same time, she tells me that becoming a suspect in the Harps
case made Ball feel like “the scum of the earth.”
He was hauled in and jailed for four days on unrelated charges of
violating his parole by drinking. Meanwhile, his life was explored in
private by investigators and in public by local media—although
the newspaper articles did Ball the courtesy of leaving out his name
since, at the time, he was only a “person of interest.”
There was much, of course, to suggest Ball as a possible suspect.
There was his arrest record dating back to his teenage years in
Florida—driving under the influence, resisting arrest, burglary,
grand theft auto, possession of marijuana, possession of
methamphetamine, possession of cocaine.
More ominously, Ball had a history of violence against women. A
restraining order granted by a Tacoma judge in 2005 had prevented Ball
from going near the mother of his child. She told the court that Ball
threatened variously to kill her, kidnap and then kill her, stab her
(said while they were eating in a restaurant), or kill her and then
kill himself. In 2003, this same ex-girlfriend reported, Ball hit her
and then said, “I want to finish you up in the woods.” In 2004, she
wrote, Ball “chased me down the hallway while I carried my infant son
in my arms.”
In November of 2005, Ball was found guilty of felony assault for
attacking another woman, a female former roommate whom he met in
Alcoholics Anonymous. The two of them had been at a party where Ball
began drinking and then, according to a police report associated with
the case, “became agitated and hostile.”
The report continues: “His hostility wasn’t directed at anyone
specific, but he yelled that he wanted to kill someone as he punched
his fist into his other open hand.” People at the party became alarmed,
but Ball’s former roommate stayed with him even after the party ended,
hoping to get him home safely. While they were walking to her car, the
report says, Ball “went literally crazy. He ran into traffic and
challenged motorists to a fight. He yelled racial obscenities at
passing pedestrians. He even attacked a black male pedestrian after
yelling, ‘Nigger!’ and running at the man.”
When the two finally arrived at the woman’s car, she told Ball that
she wanted to take him somewhere other than her apartment, no doubt
because of his behavior, and this enraged Ball, according to the
report. He then “pulled the rearview mirror from the windshield and
began striking the victim in the head with it. He then punched the
victim in the face and head several times causing bleeding. Blood
dripped into the victim’s eyes and she was forced to stop her car in
the roadway, exit, and run. The suspect chased the victim down and
pushed her to the ground. He then grabbed her by the neck and began
dragging her back to her car.”
The attack stopped only because two police officers arrived and
intervened.
By the next winter, Ball was out of jail and at the Capitol Hill
dance club R Place, where he caused trouble, was asked to leave by
security, and responded by pulling out a box-cutter-style knife and
threatening to cut one of the club’s security guards. He swung the
blade at the guard, there was a tussle, and Ball fell down a flight of
stairs and lost the blade to his knife. He was eventually hustled
outside and arrested—but not before biting the security guard on
the shoulder.
For this attack, Ball was convicted of fourth-degree assault and
sentenced to nine months in jail and two years probation, during which
time he was not to consume alcohol or controlled substances. This was
the probation that he was arrested for violating when investigators
wanted to talk to him about the Harps murder—a murder he seemed,
on paper, to be perfectly capable of committing.
Ball was, it turned out, the wrong
guy. He was released from
the King County Jail on January 9 and fully cleared of any suspicion
when, in late January, DNA evidence tied the stabbing of Shannon Harps
to another man, James Anthony Williams, who had a history of violent
threats and extreme mental instability.
Ball was off the hook, out of the pages of local newspapers, and
back on the street. A few weeks later, on February 21, Seattle police
received a report of a homicide in the Greenwood neighborhood.
They found Ball.
Then, in early March, a man named Rickey Trotter called police to
confess to the murder, saying he had acted in self-defense.
Detective Steiger, the investigator on both cases, tells me that
Trotter’s claim is “consistent with the evidence at the scene and the
statements of witnesses who didn’t know either of these people.”
Trotter and Ball were apparently both out that night, but not together.
They’d never met before their altercation. They were seen arguing about
20 minutes before Ball was killed, but there is no evidence that this
was a drug deal gone wrong, or any other kind of unusual encounter.
Steiger can’t say exactly what he believes transpired, but he tells me
not to read much into the absence of an explanation. “From the way I’m
talking to you, it makes it sound like there’s a lot more there,” he
tells me. “There’s not.”
The King County Prosecutor’s Office is currently deciding whether or
not to charge Trotter with a crime in Ball’s murder, but Steiger tells
me: “They’ve given every indication that they’re not going to
charge.”
I ask Steiger what it might mean that a man who was suspected of
stabbing someone to death in cold blood was then himself stabbed to
death. Nothing, says Steiger, who has worked as a homicide detective
for 14 years. “Most murders are stupid.”
It’s in the nature of writers,
however, to search for a
story—a narrative that offers some explanation, a string of logic
and events that point toward some cause and effect. There may very well
be such a narrative in the death of William F. Ball, but all I have
been able to see so far are fragments of a fragmented life. All I can
offer is pastiche.
Ball’s mother does not have a single narrative to explain her son’s
death, either. But she has some ideas. She blames the police for
wrongly suspecting Ball in Harps’s murder, an experience that she says
destabilized him. In addition, she has a dark theory about what
transpired the night Ball was killed, but it could not be verified.
Looking back further, she wonders whether her family’s travels all over
the world during Ball’s youth (he was conceived in Iran, born in North
Carolina, and raised all over the Middle East because of his mother’s
work decorating Arab hotels and her two husbands’ military tours)
somehow affected his development.
She believes, with something approaching absolute certainty, that
all the intoxicating substances he took into his body beginning as a
teenager—the substances already mentioned, and also the crack,
the huffed gas, and the mushrooms—precipitated his mental
fragility.
“He hurt himself with the drugs mentally,” she told me. “Something
damaged him.”
She remembers a psychiatrist in Washington State once telling her
that her son had drug-induced schizophrenia, and it’s true that
psychiatrists believe some drugs, used in some ways, can have serious
long-term effects on a person’s mental health. This is not the
much-mocked “reefer madness” stuff from the 1930s, but the very current
idea that you simply never know how your own mental chemistry is going
to react with the chemistry of the drug—or drugs—that
you’re taking. But there were other psychiatrists with other theories
about Ball, and ultimately it’s impossible to untangle whether his drug
use led to his mental distress or his mental distress led to the drug
use. It probably doesn’t matter much now; it’s clear that the two
combined in him to form an extremely unstable element.
There was a time before all of this that Kathleen Territo can talk
about with much more ease and warmth, a time before her son was “a
cuckaboo.” These are his much younger years, when he showed an ability
to play music by ear, an impressive facility with languages, and a
pool-sharking talent that earned him money from unsuspecting older kids
wherever the family traveled.
“He was a really different kind of kid,” Territo told me. “I think
he was too much for us… We were just regular middle class.”
Another fax arrives from Kathleen Territo. It’s a photocopy of the
guest book from her son’s memorial service, held at the coffee shop on
Capitol Hill where he once worked.
There is a sunflower on the cover and inside there is page after
page of kind words and testimonials.
“Will was a force of life,” says one. “Compassionate, warm, genuine,
and completely honest.”
“I met Will in recovery,” says another. “Worked side by side with
him for more than a year. I offered him my home, argued with
him—pissed him off, made him laugh, and in the end he was in my
heart. I’ll never forget him.”
They hint obliquely at his troubles: “You were nothing but a
gentleman to me.”
And they express the hope, just as his mother does, that this at
least brings a measure of relief.
“Peace now,” writes a friend. “You had too much turmoil.” 
Ryan S. Jackson contributed research to this story.
