Twelve years ago, Patricia Crowl murdered a woman named Shawn Wallace. Wallace had made the mistake of dating a man Crowl considered to be her exclusive boyfriend. Wallace, who was pregnant when she was killed in the spring of 1997, was bludgeoned and strangled, and her body was dumped beneath Crowl’s house. When it became apparent that leaving remains under her house would be problematic, Crowl enlisted the help of her ex-husband in moving Wallace’s remains to a little-traveled backstreet in Tukwila. Crowl was convicted of second-degree murder and served twelve years in state prison. She was released following a Washington State Supreme Court ruling which declared that an assault which leads to an unintended death cannot be called a murder. If the death is a result of an assault but there is no definite proof of intent to kill, the court ruled that it must be considered manslaughter. This decision in State Supreme Court, caused approximately three hundred cases to be sent back to the trial court for resentencing under the manslaughter guidelines. For Crowl, this ruling meant that she would be released far earlier than her original sentence. Crowl was released from the state prison in 2006.
Last week, Crowl again found herself enraged at another woman. This time, the woman was the ex-girlfriend of a man Crowl began dating this month. According to the man, he had last spoken with his ex-girlfriend early in November when he had called her from Cowl’s cell phone. That seemingly insignificant detail – the man used Cowl’s cell phone to call the ex – proved to be an almost deadly detail for the woman he’d dated for three years before breaking up last month. Crowl used the phone to send a text message to the ex-girlfriend asking her to meet in a parking garage in Kirkland. Because her ex-boyfriend had last called her from the same number she believed she would be meeting him. Instead, when the woman stepped out of her car Crowl ambushed her with a knife, stabbing the victim eighteen or nineteen times.
Crowl fled, and the victim had managed to hang on to her cell phone, and it is likely to have saved her life. She dialed 911 and was able to tell emergency medical and the police where to find her. She is reported to have told the dispatcher that she had been “stabbed everywhere”. The victim was transferred to Seattle and Harborview Medical Center, the region’s trauma center, where doctors treated her for a punctured lung, in addition to her other stab wounds. Fortunately, the victim’s major organs and blood vessels did not suffer major damage and despite the eighteen knife penetration wounds, she was sufficiently recovered to be released from Harborview this week.
The victim’s ex-boyfriend, who had begun dating Crowl only recently, called police to report that Crowl had told him she had to go and turn herself in to police. She did not turn herself in, but was arrested later that night when she sought treatment at Valley Medical Center in Kent for cuts on her hands. Crowl did not speak with police and immediately invoked her right to counsel. In addition to the wounds on Crowl’s hands, the text message sent to the victim specifying the location in which the attack was perpetrated and the statement from the man who was dating her, the woman pointed out Crowl from a photo array. Crowl is being held, with bail set at $3 million, on a charge of attempted first-degree murder. This time, having sent the text message and hidden in ambush, there is no real chance that she will be able to say the attack was merely an assault that went too far.
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