Murder Case Too Much For Mercer Is. Police Force -- Elvira Long's Slaying Got Lost In The Shuffle

As he sat in the lobby of the Mercer Island Police Department in the waning hours of Christmas Eve 1993, filling in the blanks on a missing-persons report, Officer Brian Noel had no idea he was recording a piece of island history.

In fact, everything about the officer's 40-minute encounter with Steven Long seemed unremarkable, down to the man's button-down shirt.

"He was just your typical Mercer Island resident," Noel recalled. "He was calm, he gave the facts, he gave out information easily."

Long, who told police his wife left after a heated argument five days earlier, was charged this week with second-degree murder for allegedly strangling his wife, the first murder case in island history. Yesterday, Long, 40, pleaded not guilty. Last Friday, Long led authorities to a ravine near North Bend where they found his wife's skeletal remains.

The island police probe is a tale of the difficulties facing a small-town police department when confronted with a big-league investigation.

In the time it took investigators to stitch together the gruesome details of Elvira Long's death, Long had divorced her, got married - to a Russian woman he met through an international dating service - and had a new baby, living all the while in the same lavender rambler off Island Crest Way.

For nearly two years after it was reported, case number 93-2998 remained on the bottom rung for Mercer Island detectives, sitting untouched for months at a time beneath a stack of more pressing cases. Detectives say the case was low priority because nothing, at first, suggested foul play. Elvira appeared to have simply walked away from the rambler after a marital dispute.

About a week after Long reported his wife had left home, the case was assigned to Ken Wegner, an officer doing a stint as the department's youth-crime detective. Since he handled most of the missing-persons cases on the island, Wegner took on the case of Elvira Long along with his other 30 or so cases of runaway youths and juvenile crime.

That day, Wegner sent out a national teletype. The next day, he left a message on the Longs' answering machine. A week later, he met with Long and asked for credit-card and bank-account information.

During that meeting, Long showed no signs of nervousness. He struck the investigator as being honest about his marital problems and told Wegner the argument started when Elvira found a copy of a Victoria's Secret catalog he had hidden from her.

"There were no beads of sweat on his forehead and he wasn't smoking a cigarette down to the filter," Wegner recalled.

Long showed Wegner a transaction record from an ATM machine in Issaquah made the morning of his wife's disappearance. He told Wegner he didn't withdraw the money. Wegner also interviewed two of Long's three children, who believed they had seen their mother on a dark rainy night a few days after she disappeared.

Elvira's parents said they had received a strange phone call one day in which there was a slight pause and a hang-up. They thought it might have been their missing daughter.

Wegner checked local hotels, bus stations and medical examiners' offices. He called Elvira's sister in Texas, collected dental X-rays and visited shelters for battered women. He talked to her friends and relatives and even interviewed Elvira's hairdresser in Factoria. Many who knew Elvira said she was a dedicated mother who would not run away.

"All indications showed she was a caring mother, and a caring mother does not take off and leave her children," Wegner said.

None of his checks suggested foul play, but one thing troubled Wegner. Why didn't Elvira Long, 38, at least contact her children to say she was all right?

Her husband offered a plausible answer. His wife, he said, had a history of bizarre behavior. Once she even tried to jump out of a car when the two were arguing during a trip to California. Another time, she caused a scene when they were in Europe.

Wegner said there was no reason to believe he was dealing with anything other than the standard missing-persons case.

His last notation in the case file was Feb. 8, 1994.

Wegner rotated back to patrol that June and handed off the Long file to Detective Jonathan Crane along with the rest of his open cases.

The next notation came in October 1994, when Crane opened the file to begin working on it. Newer cases, explained Mercer Island Detective Sgt. Alan Lacy, usually take precedence over older ones.

One of the first things Crane did was call Maria Freestone, Elvira Long's sister who lives in Houston. He learned that Long had filed for divorce in June and planned to marry a new wife, Anna Pavlova, in Russia.

"Now the flags were up big-time," said Lacy, Crane's supervisor at the time. "The same day he called Steven Long."

Crane arranged to meet Long at police headquarters Dec. 6. In the interim, he spoke to a good friend of Elvira's who stressed her dedication to her children.

"The first thing she (the friend) told me was she unhesitatingly believed foul play had occurred," Crane noted in his report.

When Long failed to show at the scheduled appointment, Crane went to his house and set up a new meeting for two days later.

The interview disturbed Long so much that he wrote a two-page complaint to the Mercer Island director of public safety.

"(Crane) has a strongly held theory that I killed my wife," the Dec. 11, 1994, letter read.

"I find this illuminating," Crane wrote in his report.

But the suspicions did not bump the case to the top of the pile. Crane still had all his other open files and new cases coming in all the time.

For most of 1994, Crane spent much of his time investigating a brazen home-invasion robbery that grabbed island headlines just two weeks before Elvira Long was reported missing, Lacy said.

It was eight months before the Long case was reviewed again.

Crane had accepted a job at the Vail, Colo., Police Department in October 1995 and briefed Lacy on all the unsolved cases he was leaving behind.

Down a detective, Lacy decided to check on the Long case on his own.

During an interview with the Longs' eldest daughter, Angela, who was 15 at the time, Lacy learned for the first time that Elvira Long cooked dinner every night and insisted that everyone sit at the table together, whether they wanted to or not. The night before she disappeared, Angela told Lacy, her mother did not come out of the bedroom to fix dinner.

He also learned Elvira Long was still nursing her 18-month-old baby at the time and had some prized possessions she would never have left behind. Angela told him her parents were fighting in the bedroom the night before her mother's disappearance when suddenly the room became quiet. Steven Long told his daughter to cook dinner that night.

At the time, Lacy was reading about an Oregon murder case that was solved without a body ever being found. That case gave him ideas about what kinds of questions to ask. When he put everything together, he said, "I knew I was looking at a homicide."

That month, island police asked the Puget Sound Violent Crimes Task Force to take over. A nine-month investigation ended last week when Long was arrested in Canada. Prosecutors say he had $55,000 in cash and planned to immigrate to New Zealand to start a new life.