A King County jury Thursday found a Burien man guilty of two counts of murder for killing a couple in 2020, then dismembering their bodies and disposing of their remains in Puget Sound and the Duwamish River.
Family members of Jessica Lewis and Austin Wenner quietly cried as the verdicts were read after 1 1/2 days of jury deliberations and a two-month trial before Superior Court Judge Aimée Sutton. In addition to two counts of second-degree murder, the jury of 10 men and two women also determined the couple's landlord, 64-year-old Michael Dudley, was armed with a firearm when he killed them — an enhancement that will add 10 years to his prison term when he's sentenced March 10.
"I'm so grateful justice was done ... The world is a safer place without Michael Dudley in it," Wenner's mother, Charleen Kriens, said outside the courtroom. "Obviously, we'll never be completely healed, but our family won't let Michael Dudley take away our lives too."
Gina Jaschke, Lewis' aunt, called Dudley "a master manipulator" and said she was grateful to the Seattle police detectives and King County sheriff's deputies who pieced the case against him together.
"I knew in my heart he was guilty from the very beginning," she said. "I'm so glad it's over."
During closing arguments Tuesday, Deputy Prosecutor Raymond Lee conceded that aside from the victims' remains, which showed Lewis, 35, and Wenner, 27, had been fatally shot, all of the state's evidence against Dudley was circumstantial. Police never found the gun used in the killings, and only a small smudge of Wenner's blood was found in the bedroom where investigators think the couple's remains were dismembered.
"No crime is perfect ... [but] the things he missed created a trail that led police directly to him," Lee said. He told jurors the state wasn't required to prove how or where the victims' bodies were dismembered or if other people were involved in the dismemberment and disposal of their remains.
Defense attorney Bradley Barshis criticized the Seattle police investigation as shoddy, impugned the credibility of the state's star witness and said an attic-to-basement search of Dudley's house by "blood experts" with the State Patrol didn't turn up any evidence — other than the smudge of Wenner's blood. Firearms experts also agreed three bullets found in the bedroom "didn't go through a human body," he said.
At one point, Barshis — who told jurors the average human body contains five liters of blood — lined up five, 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke on a ledge before the jury box, a visual aid to show jurors how much blood would have been at the scene.
Barshis said investigators' search tools, including cadaver dogs, were among the best available, but "there just simply wasn't anything because nothing happened at my client's house." No blood was found in Dudley's vehicles, either.
Phone records played a large role in the state's case, but Barshis argued prosecutors cherry-picked which data to present to jurors, telling them the data was unreliable and that it's "next to impossible to determine a person's location" based on cellphone pings.
According to Lee, the records showed Lewis' cellphone, which she and Wenner both used to stay in regular contact with their families and friends, "went dark" just after 7 p.m. on June 9, 2020. Around the same time, a couple called 911 and reported hearing gunshots coming from inside Dudley's house on Ambaum Boulevard South. The husband later told police he also heard a male voice say, "Don't do this, we'll just leave," Lee said.
Phone records showed Dudley's cellphone pinged off a tower near West Seattle's Alki Beach late on June 18, 2020 — the only time it did so in nearly three months' worth of records obtained by police, Lee said. The next afternoon, a group of teenagers called 911 after finding a suitcase in the rocks off Duwamish Head and opening it with a stick while recording a TikTok post.
The couple's remains were found inside the suitcase, another duffel bag found nearby and a third bag recovered by sheriff's deputies from the Duwamish River four days later.
A woman who briefly moved into Dudley's house arrived late on the night Lewis and Wenner were killed. She later told police Dudley had scratches and broken eyeglasses, according to Lee, and testified that she saw a human hand sticking up from a pile of clothes in the bedroom Lewis and Wenner had shared.
"The body would've been in the last stages of rigor, so a hand sticking up wouldn't be unreasonable given the timeline," Lee said.
Lee said the woman, who saw several guns in a sink and ultimately got rid of the weapons for Dudley, also photographed apparent bullet strikes to furniture in the same bedroom, where police would later discover two bullet holes, one of them patched with plumber's putty and painted over. Lee noted police later found a can of plumber's putty on Dudley's dresser.
When Wenner's father couldn't reach Lewis or his son, he went to Dudley's house and Dudley told him the couple had moved out, Lee said. His father saw a pile of clothes in the garbage that he knew belonged to Wenner.
"We know they're not exactly flush with money, so why would they leave their personal belongings behind if they were moving out voluntarily?" Lee asked.
By the time Dudley was arrested Aug. 19, 2020, he had had two months and 10 days "to clean up his home," Lee told the jury.
