Boyfriend Of Victim Recalls Grilling

At first, Bellevue police thought the person who had done all those terrible things to Carol Marie Beethe last August was her boyfriend, Mike.

And when he drove up to her Bellevue house the day her body was found, detectives questioned him until 3 a.m. They started out nice, he said. They ended mean. Despite his repeated denials, they told him they knew his blue Corvette had been seen the morning of the murder, and that he might as well admit he'd done it.

"After constantly drilling it into my head that I was there, I said, `If I was there, I don't remember it,' " Mike Sewell testified yesterday. "The persuasion was pretty intense. It was not a kind thing that they did."

Police no longer believe Sewell killed Beethe. But public defenders for George Waterfield Russell, the man on trial for the Beethe killing and two others, tried yesterday to convince a King County Superior Court jury that maybe police were right the first time.

Russell, a 33-year-old Mercer Island resident, has pleaded not guilty to aggravated-murder charges in the death of Beethe, 35. He also has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder in the death of Andrea Levine, 24, and to a first-degree-murder charge in the death of Mary Anne Pohlreich, 27. He is the first person King County has ever tried as a serial killer.

All three Eastside women, murdered in the summer of 1990, were beaten about the head, sexually assaulted with objects and posed after death.

From the beginning of the trial, the defense attorneys have suggested that Sewell, jealous that Beethe was seeing another man, was the killer in at least the Beethe case. Yesterday, they tried to reinforce that.

"Did you know she was seeing another gentleman?" public defender Brad Hampton asked Sewell, a project manager for a construction company. "Would it be accurate to say (when police detectives told him) that you went into an extreme rage?"

Sewell denied any rage, and said he and Beethe had agreed to have platonic friends as they tried to figure out where their relationship was heading. After living together about 18 months, Sewell said, he'd moved out in April because of Beethe's continuing relationship with her ex-husband. Then a few weeks later, Beethe found out about an affair Sewell had been having. She and the other woman got together and sent Sewell roses painted black and an "insulting" card.

Still, according to Sewell, the two were planning a trip to the British Virgin Islands at the time of Beethe's death on Aug. 9, and he was trying to "mend fences."

Sewell said he'd last talked to Beethe about 11 p.m. Aug. 8 by phone, then went to bed. He was to meet her at 6 o'clock the next morning at a tanning salon, but he overslept, he said. That evening, Sewell testified, a mutual acquaintance told him his girlfriend had been killed.

He said when he got the news, he was at Papagayo's, the Bellevue bar and restaurant where Pohlreich was last seen before her nude body was found in a parking lot about a mile away. Russell was seen at Papagayo's the night of Pohlreich's death.

Hampton asked why Sewell, when he got the terrible news, didn't tell his companion at the restaurant. "I was not believing it," Sewell said. "I just told her it was time to leave."

Bellevue police detectives said they quit thinking of Sewell as a suspect when hair and fiber evidence incriminating Russell, who is African-American, was returned from the FBI crime lab.

Beethe is white, but on Beethe's pillow, rug, bed sheet and underpants were Negroid hairs and fragments, testified Robert Fram, an FBI special agent.