Trials And Troubles In Happy Valley

A 19-year-old, Michael Lauderdale, drove a 21-year-old male friend to a remote spot after a party last fall. There, Lauderdale bludgeoned his companion to death with a Louisville Slugger, then had sex with the corpse.

In April a woman and her 15-year-old daughter were found naked and slain in their tan rambler-style house. The mother worked for a leading car dealership; the girl was a popular ninth grader who played softball. Police say the two had been stabbed and "sexually mutilated."

This last, coupled with the ongoing sex-ring story, is driving Wenatchee toward hysteria, At Rocky's House of Guns on the main drag, sales of .38 special and 9-mm handguns are booming. Neighbors long accustomed to leading a Mayberry kind of life--unlocked houses, easy trust-find themselves drawing inward. "I've got a 9-year-old daughter who's not spending the night over at other people's houses any-more," says Mike Cassidy, co-owner of a local business journal. "And my 12-year-old son is going around locking doors and windows at night, for the first time ever. Everybody's shaken."

Of course, it's not unheard of for a brutal crime or spectacular scandal to unfold in a small town. But what authorities say is happening in Wenatchee breaks just about every sexual and social taboo you can think of. Is this depressingly long streak of civic bad luck a coincidence, or is there a reason so many bad things seem to be going on here?

Part of the answer may lie in the town's past. Until the late 1940s, there were two disparate classes here: the people who owned the apple orchards or timber mills, and the transients who picked the fruit or cut the forests. The owner class was affluent and stable. Many workers, however, lived in another, rougher, frontier world. Modern Wenatchee took shape in 1952, the year Alcoa built a huge aluminum-manufacturing plant and, with it, the middle class. This is the sunny, friendly town that prompted "The Rating Guide to Life in America's Small Cities" to name Wenatchee the nation's fourth-best "micropolitan area" in 1990--a distinction publicized by USA Today. Yet a small, loosely structured subculture remains, its tenuous social roots stretching back to the subsistence fruit pickers and tough lumberjacks. "There are two Wenatchees, and neither knows the other," says Jim Lynch, a lawyer who served as mayor for 16 years. "There's the middle class, which leads an insular life. Then there's the other half--and they have always had to live by their wits." In this separate Wenatchee, people tend to feel more clearly the impact of the region's lower per capita incomes - and the fact that both the area's unemployment and felony rates usually run 50 percent higher than state averages.