Socks, eyeballs help Bellevue officer solve city’s oldest cold case

The city of Bellevue’s first homicide case is no longer a mystery thanks to some old-fashioned police work.

The Bellevue Police Department closed a cold case from 1965, where 23-year-old Loren Sundholm was stabbed to death and his body was found in blackberry bushes along the side of a road.

Officer Seth Tyler, public information officer with the BPD, said Det. Shelby Shearer re-opened the case two years ago to give it another critical look. Using crime scene photographs, and with assistance from the King County Medical Examiner and Prosecutor’s office, were able to disprove the story given by the primary suspect, Bill Huff, who died in 2009. Tyler said the prosecutor would have prosecuted Huff based on the investigation. That fact alone was enough to give the family some closure.

Related: Police release sketch of alleged Redmond attacker

“That was really what the victim’s family was looking for all these years was just someone to tell them, ‘This is what happened,'” Tyler said. “And we were able to do that.”

Tyler said the only evidence the detective had to go by was the 1965 crime-scene photos and that he interviewed witnesses, Huff’s ex-wives and people who knew the suspect.

A critical piece of evidence came from photographs of the victim in the blackberry bushes, as well as of Huff’s car.

Tyler said Huff’s alibi was that he and Sundholm were involved in a road-rage incident with two other men and that the victim went missing.

“We now know that story to be a lie,” Tyler said.

Tyler says police believe that Huff stabbed Sundholm several times in the car and then dumped him on the side of the road in blackberry bushes. The primary clues came from the fact that the victim was only found wearing socks. And those socks were clean.

“In this area where the suspect claimed that they got in the fight on the side of the road, it was a very muddy area,” Tyler said. “So if the victim had actually, in fact, been in a fight with someone else, he would have had mud on his socks.”

The other crucial piece the detective noticed involved scratches on the victim’s eyeballs from the blackberry bushes. The medical examiner determined that the only way scratches could have happened in that way is if the victim was placed into the bushes, not if he fell into them from a fight.

“The medical examiner was very helpful in helping to explain that if you’re alive and you fall into the blackberry bushes, you’re not going to have your eyes open, you’re going to close your eyes and then you’re not going to have scratches on your actual eyes; you’ll have scratches on your eyelids,” Tyler said. “What that tells us is that he was already dead when he was placed into the blackberry bushes that night.”

Follow @http://twitter.com/Mynorthwest