`I Want Proof,' Says Suspect's Mother

BELLEVUE

FRANCES KNIGHT refuses to believe her daughter, Terry Rose, could have plotted to kill her own husband.

From a Virginia girl growing up with civil-servant parents in Guam to a hardworking, single mother in Hawaii, Teresa Rose's heart always belonged in the South Seas, her mother said this morning.

So when her new husband, Gerald Rose, moved her to Bellevue, her mother said, Teresa made him promise that they would move back to Hawaii in three years.

"Well, when that three years was up, she was still sitting there (in Bellevue)," Frances Knight of Virginia Beach, Va., said this morning.

Now Terry Rose is sitting in the King County Jail, awaiting murder-conspiracy charges in an alleged plot against her husband. Prosecutors are expected to file charges tomorrow.

Her alleged accomplice, 20-year-old Jason McDaniels, is also locked up, and not only facing conspiracy charges, but waiting to be arraigned tomorrow on a first-degree murder charge in the slaying of Terry Rose's 15-year-old daughter.

But 70-year-old Knight doesn't believe a word of the twisted, sinister tale of a murder plot that is the stuff of tabloid television or Hollywood movie scripts.

"Why isn't Mr. Rose doing something to help his wife?" Knight wonders. "Unless he believes everything he is hearing. He must believe everything people are telling him. I want proof. I want it in black and white."

Instead, Jerry Rose filed a no-contact order yesterday against his jailed wife, saying "Jason McDaniels attempted to take the life of Gerald. Incident was planned by Teresa."

The skeins of the alleged plot began to unravel March 10, when the body of Rose's daughter, Sarah Starling, was found beaten, strangled and knifed in the ivy-covered forest floor of Kingsgate Park north of Kirkland.

Within hours, King County Sheriff's detectives rounded up 19-year-old Thomas Mullin-Coston as he arrived at the crime scene with the Roses. Days later, they picked up McDaniels in Spokane as he tried to bum money off an acquaintance.

Mullin-Coston has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in Starling's death. He is accused of choking her into unconsciousness before McDaniels finished her off with a slash to the throat.

But police say Mullin-Coston is not believed to be involved in the murder plot against Jerry Rose. Conversely, he helped police put together a case against McDaniels and Terry Rose, detectives say.

Additionally, police believe Starling was in on the plot against her stepfather. But they think she was killed out of McDaniels' jealousy that she wanted to break off their dating relationship. And perhaps McDaniels and Mullin-Coston wanted to sidestep Terry Rose's deal, kill her and her husband and make off with all their belongings, police say.

Police are adamant Terry Rose had nothing to do with her daughter's murder.

Detectives first heard of a murder-for-hire plot from girlfriends of Starling who also knew McDaniels and Starling's mother. By the time they arrested Rose Friday, more than a dozen young people, described as typically uncooperative with police until now, had come forward, police said.

"I just figured I should," said 20-year-old Nicole Gould of Kirkland, a friend of Starling and McDaniels who gave police one of the first accounts of the plot. She said Rose told her of the plan "two or three times," but never said why she wanted her husband dead.

Now police think Terry Rose offered McDaniels part of a $600,000 life-insurance payoff, a new SUV and tickets to join her in flight to Hawaii in return for strangling Jerry Rose, a 56-year-old manager at Bellevue-based Cost-U-Less, his family's multinational chain of warehouse retail stores.

And police say McDaniels and Terry Rose attempted to complete the scheme last month, foiled only when Mr. Rose entered his home through the wrong door.

A man who answered the phone at the Rose home last night said Jerry Rose wouldn't comment.

This morning, though, Knight described her daughter as "very close to her God . . . a church-going person." She was a devout and active member in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, her mother said, though the regional organization of the church yesterday disavowed any knowledge of her membership.

Born Teresa Knight in Virginia in 1954, she went to high school in Norfolk, her mother said.

In 1968, Rose's father, a government worker, took a job in the U.S. territory of Guam. They stayed there until 1974.

During that time, Rose met Bobby Starling. She followed him when he moved with his family to Hawaii, Knight said. In 1983, Sarah Starling was born.

But within a few years, Knight said, Bobby and Terry Starling split.

Faced with raising a child on her own, the newly divorced Terry Starling cleaned Hawaiian houses and went to nursing school, eventually getting a job as a physical-therapy assistant at a local hospital.

She also faced physical challenges. Severe arthritis forces her to walk with a cane.

Sometime in the early 1990s, Terry Starling met Jerry Rose while he was in Hawaii helping to open new retail stores. He married her there and they moved to Bellevue.

But Knight and others who know Terry Rose say she always hated Washington. Her daughter was getting in trouble in school. And she may have carried a flame for Bobby Starling.

"She always called Bobby and said she was miserable and wanted to move back, ever since she left," said Nan Starling, Bobby's second wife who lives in Hawaii. "She just didn't love Jerry. She was always in love with Bobby."

Police have no formal record of any domestic disturbances at the Rose home, a modest rental near Bellevue Community College. Police say they have no evidence Jerry Rose did anything to prompt a murder plot.

Knight said she doesn't think her daughter could ever be so unhappy that she would resort to murder. Instead, she said, she thinks the plot is against Terry Rose.

"I honestly believe, now I could be wrong, but I believe that to keep attention away from the other two boys (McDaniels and Mullin-Coston), all this has been thrown into her lap," Knight says bitterly.

"Jerry is the one who lived with her, and she is the only one who really knows him. Therefore, Teresa is the only one who knows exactly what went on in that house. When you close the door (of the house), you don't know what's going on. I can't fathom what's happened."