Murder On A Whim -- Duvall Realtor's Last Hour Comes On Mountain Road

SECOND OP TWO PARTS

It is perhaps one of the most feared and least-understood crimes, the ultimate senseless act: killing a stranger who just happened to be in a particular place at a particular time. Today The Seattle Times concludes a two-part exploration of the events and emotions, the ironies and incongruities behind such a case.

From all appearances, Richard Duncan had it made. A successful career, a nice home on the lake, four cars, gold travel cards and a new business he planned to begin May 1.

In tiny Duvall and the surrounding suburban communities, the tall, heavy, dark-haired man was a familiar image, whether he was downing hamburgers at the eateries or unstopping a toilet at the bank.

``He was very ambitious. He really wanted to make his fortune at 30,'' says his mother, Jeanette Duncan, who lives in Oregon.

Duncan grew up in Edmonds in a tidy neighborhood of tract homes. He attended Holy Rosary Elementary School and graduated from Edmonds High School.

Classmates and former teachers remember Duncan as a quiet, average student who was always among the tallest boys in the class. His passions were motorcycles, tinkering with a vintage sports car and sailing with his family on Puget Sound.

In high school, Duncan worked at a McDonald's restaurant in Lynnwood and told his parents he intended to make his career with the fast-food chain. In 1979, he spent several months in La Grande, Ore., working as an assistant manager of a new McDonald's. This job, say friends, spawned his love for Eastern Oregon.

Jim Monroe, a Portland businessman who built the La Grande restaurant, recalls inviting Duncan for Thanksgiving dinner that year. ``I remember it was snowing and he remarked how neat it was, how lucky we were to live in a small town,'' says Monroe. ``Rich seemed to dream an awful lot.''

Duncan soon decided those dreams ran higher than managing restaurants. ``He had the drive to make enough money to do whatever he wanted to do,'' says Al Hollis, an old school friend. ``For him, it was to learn real estate.''

Duncan earned his real-estate license in 1978, less than a year after he graduated from high school. It was the beginning of a career that would bring him the money and prestige he had long coveted. It came when property sales in eastern King County and Snohomish County began soaring. For Duncan, he was in the right place at absolutely the right time.

His talents did not escape Andy Weiss and Vicky Nardone, whose Snohomish County realty firm was looking for young, ambitious salespeople. Duncan joined them in 1979, and the three quickly became friends.

Duncan and Weiss shared a love of driving back roads in their Subarus, drinking beer and, as Weiss says, ``looking for dirt.''

And they sold property. Lots of property. Weiss recalls the day a deal had to close by 4:30 p.m. and the seller lived in Northern California. With Duncan at the wheel, the two left Seattle near midnight the day before, drove to California and back, met the deadline and made the sale.

Today Weiss offers Duncan his highest compliment: ``Rich was an opportunist, a selfish, greedy kind of guy - all the attributes it takes to make him a success.''

In 1983, Duncan left to start his own company. Duncan & Associates. It was then he met his future wife, Karen, who was going through a divorce andselling her house. By all accounts it was a whirlwind courtship: the two married in Monroe in 1984. They had no children.

Karen will say little about her life with Duncan. ``I feel very strongly about it,'' she says. ``I guard my personal life. Rich was a very private person.''

Friends agree that even though Duncan enjoyed socializing, he rarely discussed certain parts of his life. Several friends says they knew little about his parents or his childhood, and they were surprised when he married Karen, a woman 15 years older than him. ``They were as different as night and day,'' says Nardone. ``Rich could be his adult, grown-up, 45-year-old banker person with Karen.''

Nardone and Duncan started a company together in 1988, and built three houses before the business closed. By this time Duncan had merged his company with Duvall Realty, later becoming its managing broker. He basically ran the firm, recalls owner Mike Grady.

By all accounts, these were salad days for Duncan. He was president of the homeowners association on Lake Margaret, where he lived, and a founder of the new Valley Community Bank in Duvall. He was traveling, taking trips from Alaska to Australia. He would even fly to New York for the day just to boost his frequent-flier mileage, say friends.

Often, friends believe, they held him back. Tom Pensky, an appraiser and close friend of Duncan, recalls the time Duncan wanted to drive to South America and cross the Amazon River.

Pensky still laughs at the suggestion: ``In the jungle, blowing a tire with snakes all around? That's not my idea of fun.''

``If anything, Rich taught people how to live more,'' says Pensky. ``He could be more a friend to you than you could be to him.''

Duncan planned to go to Germany with friends in May and had the tickets when he disappeared.

Last December, Duncan sat down with Grady and looked at the real-estate market. It was going flat, they agreed. Duncan decided he would go back to selling property for the company and building houses, says Grady. Last spring, he incorporated a new company and, effective May 1, resigned as managing broker at Duvall Realty. He knew his life was going to change. Little did anyone know it was also going to end.

The camping trip to the Mountain Loop Highway in May was meant to be a pleasant break for Phillip Van Hillman, who had been working hard at a high-stress sales job.

Despite heavy parole restrictions mandating that he stay away from alcohol and even out of taverns, Hillman had been drinking off and on since he was paroled from prison in June 1988. That fall, he went on a two-week alcohol-and-cocaine binge and nearly died.

From his cell at the Snohomish County Jail, Hillman recalls that the binge occurred because of the stresses he felt managing a drug-infested, low-income apartment complex, work for which Seattle police had commended him.

In any case, his wife, Sharon, and one of Hillman's relatives quickly got him into a treatment program, with the approval of Marsha Meadows, Hillman's parole supervisor.

His episode was a clear violation of his parole restrictions, and Meadows considered carefully whether to recommend he be sent back to prison. ``I wouldn't have blamed her,'' says Hillman. ``It's not like I go out and rob bubble-gum machines when I'm drinking.''

But for a number of reasons, Meadows recommended to the parole board that Hillman be allowed to stay in the community. He had shown no signs of violence and had reported the violation himself, Meadows noted, adding that he appeared to be stabilized and willing to do something about the problem by checking into the treatment program.

Up until then, Meadows says, Hillman was a model parolee who impressed her on those points that interest parole officers.

``Phil seemed very interested in working, obtaining the nice things in life through his own perseverance and trying to improve himself,'' Meadows says.

Because of Hillman's history, he was under tighter parole supervision than was required, she says.

But the system is far from foolproof, Meadows acknowledges, since in the end, it depends on the parolee and those who are close to report problems.

The parole board followed Meadows' recommendation, and for several months after he got out of the treatment program, Hillman stayed on the straight and narrow. He landed a job at a Bellevue car dealership and soon began impressing his bosses with his ability to sell.

He was irresistible, it seemed, charming prospective customers with his boyish grin and sense of humor.

As a car salesman, Hillman was responsible, performed well under pressure and not only was good at his job but was a good citizen as well, the dealership's general manager wrote in a letter early last year to the parole board, which was considering his lapse.

For several months in mid-1989, Hillman enrolled in an anger-management course at Harborview Medical Center. He successfully completed it in October.

It all looked great on paper.

But inside Hillman's head, trouble was brewing. Success, it seemed, was difficult. For one thing, in the car-selling world, it was often celebrated in the cocktail lounge.

``I wanted to do what those people did,'' he says. ``It's the only point in my whole life I've been really good at anything, anything where I was real successful and made real good money.''

After all, he'd been in prison almost all his adult life. But even more than success, he wanted to be like other people.

``I remember looking at people and thinking, `I wish I could be normal, I wish I could be like that,' '' he says.

He knew he was an alcoholic.

Still, step by step, he walked away from the controls he'd built up in his life. His Alcoholics Anonymous group had written in support of his being allowed to stay in the community after his cocaine-and-alcohol binge, saying he had been honest with them and was ``seriously attempting to recover.''

But Hillman began missing meetings, using work as his excuse. ``To drink like normal people'' became an important goal. A tenet of AA is that alcoholics can never drink like ``normal people.''

He started off slowly, recalls Sharon Hillman; a drink on their anniversary, that sort of thing. ``But then it grabbed him,'' she recalls.

Several months before Duncan's murder, Hillman again went on a bender, leaving his family frantic with worry. For two hours one night, his wife and another family member called every agency they could think of, trying to find a way to have Hillman committed involuntarily until he was sober.

They couldn't call the police, the family member explains, because they knew Hillman had stretched his luck with his last violation of his parole restrictions.

The next time, Meadows had made it clear, he would go to prison.

``I couldn't send him back to jail for drinking a beer,'' says the family member. ``What do you do? When they're drunk they won't go in. There was no way. Then when he sobered up, he says, `I can do it alone.' ''

Sharon Hillman, though she left him once, found she had no leverage against her husband's compulsive need.

``My father was also an alcoholic,'' she says. She now attends a group of adult children of alcoholics, trying to understand her own behavior, which included drinking with her husband, protecting him and even allowing him to use her shotgun - the one he had with him when he was arrested in May.

``Nurturing - you get pulled into that,'' she says. ``You feel if someone needs you, you have to protect him.''

Even if she had tried harder, Hillman says, his wife wouldn't have been able to stop him. ``An alcoholic is real good at talking people into things,'' he says. ``I can't blame Sharon for that. I have always been kind of dominating.''

Hillman was never violent toward her, his wife says. ``He's being portrayed as a heartless ice man,'' she says, ``but there was a very loving, compassionate side to him.

``And he was a very wonderful, loving husband to me,'' she adds, tears starting to blur her words.

She thought about calling Phil's parole officer but decided against it.

``I was trying to cover up and hide and keep my life,'' she says. ``I wasn't working, and he did make a good income. I didn't want him to go back to prison and have him be taken away from me.''

Hillman was still doing well at work and trying to be home more.

Just a few days before they left to go camping near Darrington, he rented some videotapes - ``Relentless'' and ``Black Rain,'' violent films featuring a sadistic serial killer and an aggressive cop.

Everyone was hoping for the best.

Because he was changing jobs, says Mike Grady, Richard Duncan's realtor associate, Duncan took a couple of days off from work to drive to a favorite spot: La Grande, Ore.

According to his friends, it was to be a quick, two-day trip to look at property. So on May 1, he piled his briefcase, two pagers, cellular telephone and overnight bag into his red Mustang and headed south.

Late that night, he called his wife from Moses Lake to say he would return home the next day over the North Cascades Highway. He told her he'd arrive sometime in the afternoon, say friends.

Concern turned to anxiety and then to dread as the hours crawled and Duncan still hadn't returned. John Sourbeer, a close friend and frequent traveling companion, had been paging him since noon and had no response.

It was unusual of Duncan, say friends, not to let Karen know he'd be late. And he had an early bank meeting the next day.

Outside, it was drizzling. Duncan had left home with a thin shirt and no jacket.

The next day, May 3, Karen Duncan reported her husband missing. But there were few clues: He had purchased gasoline at Twisp at 6:30 a.m., and friends knew he had his eye on property on the Mountain Loop Highway.

Over the next week, 100 friends scoured Snohomish and Okanogan counties. Although Duncan's Mustang was found in a Darrington parking lot, there was no sign of its owner, his briefcase or his telephone.

In desperation, friends again and again called his portable phone and pagers hoping some noise would lead them to Duncan.

The case finally broke May 12 when Sharon Hillman led police to Duncan's body.

After the murder, Sharon says she went into shock. Finally, it was imagining Karen Duncan's anguish that moved her to call the police, Sharon says.

Hillman was arrested May 12 near a North Bend campsite where he had gone into hiding. According to court records, a search of his camp produced a fishing pole, a vodka bottle and a loaded shotgun. Tests showed that shotgun shells found near Duncan's body came from the gun in Hillman's tent.

To work out their anger, friends of Duncan's later returned to the murder scene to search for clues that could explain the inexplicable.

``Rich and I weren't complete,'' says realtor Nardone, among the searchers. ``We had years to go in and out of business together.''

The Jehovah's Witnesses memorial service drew 400 people to a school overlooking a peaceful valley in Duvall. It was Karen Duncan's congregation.

Duncan was not a member of that church, and many of his friends found the service unsettling.

``We went out afterwards and killed a case of Silver Bullet,'' says Nardone. ``We drank Coors in Rich's honor. He would have loved it.''

Today, life is starting to return to normal in Duvall. But friends and family wonder if things will ever be the same.

Karen Duncan pauses as she struggles through her husband's papers and thinks, ``Rich is the only one who could know the answers.''

Vicky Nardone still dreams that Duncan is alive, eating his greasy hamburgers and drinking his giant-size cups of soda.

Andy Weiss intentionally picks up hitchhikers, determined that what happened to Duncan not destroy his trust in strangers.

In the end, no one - not even Phillip Hillman - can understand what happened in those shrouded woods that day in early May. Perhaps the only comfort was offered by Kent Toepfer, a family friend who conducted Duncan's memorial service.

``The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong,'' says Toepfer, reading from Ecclesiastes. ``But time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come.''