A Quest Cut Short : Troubled Seattle Girl’s Desperate Search for a New Life Ends in Death in a Van Nuys Park

Jacquie Raye Graham’s 18 years of life were marked with hardship. Her father’s imprisonment during her infancy and the accidental death of her younger brother left her deeply troubled. In the spring, hoping to start her life anew, she moved to Los Angeles.

Richard Heywood Jordan, 40, was a graphic artist living in Sherman Oaks. He had worked for Type Lab Inc. in West Hollywood since late 1985. Although his background seemed more stable than Graham’s, Jordan’s ex-wife charged that he was prone to abusive alcoholic rages.

On July 19, Graham’s and Jordan’s paths crossed. On July 20, Graham was dead. The next day Jordan was arrested on suspicion of her murder.

Jordan is to be arraigned Wednesday on a charge that he killed Graham. William T. Graysen, an attorney whom Jordan has consulted, said Jordan probably will plead innocent to the murder charge in Van Nuys Municipal Court, but he declined to comment further.

Graham and her boyfriend, Richard Hurst, 20, had left “bad influences” in Seattle to look for work and start a new life in Southern California, Hurst said.

But in Los Angeles, by mid-July, Graham and Hurst were down on their luck, police said, and Graham turned to prostitution. A day later, her strangled body was found in a Van Nuys park.

Hurst, who said he had tried to talk Graham out of having sex for money, said he nonetheless accompanied her to a bus stop bench on Sepulveda Boulevard and watched her enter Jordan’s brown 1978 Ford sedan.

‘One Time Only’

“She said she was going to do it one way or another,” Hurst said. “And she told me it was going to be one time only, for sure. . . . Everybody does stupid things, and I guess, one stupid thing too many.”

Detectives said Graham and Hurst may have been under pressure to repay a debt.

“They were desperate kids,” Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Christine Thurmond said.

Authorities said they believed the incident marked Graham’s first attempt at prostitution. “We have nothing to show otherwise,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Mel Arnold. The motive for the slaying is unclear, except that it was “sex-related,” he said.

Graham had no arrest record in California, Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew W. Diamond said. The police vice unit in Seattle has no record of having arrested her, Seattle Police Sgt. Gene Doman said.

Her adoptive father, Ted Green, 47, a garage-door factory worker of Kent, Wash., described Graham as “a sweet little gal” who never recovered from the blow of her younger brother’s accidental death in 1980, when Graham was 11.

Tony, then 10, and some friends were sleeping in a tent on the rural Idaho property of Green’s brother, who woke early that morning, started his pickup truck and went back into the house for a thermos bottle of coffee. The truck inexplicably rolled backward down the incline, took a sharp turn toward the tent and crushed Tony’s skull.

Jacquie, who was not camping with the group, apparently blamed herself for the incident, although Green never figured out why, he said. “I could never get a straight answer out of her.

“She had a lot of friends and she was pretty active, but after that accident, she just kept to herself, and she wouldn’t bring out her whole feelings,” Green said. “We did a lot of talking; we had counseling and other things.

Discovered Adoption

Then, a couple of years later, “She found out I wasn’t her real dad.”

Green told Jacquie about her real father, who he said had been in prison during much of her childhood. Then she began running away from home occasionally, he said.

Her friendship with Hurst started a little over a year ago. He had hoped to marry her in September, Hurst said.

“When Jacquie and I decided that we were going to try to make a new life for ourselves and everything, I figured we could move down here and start fresh,” he said. Graham started with short-lived jobs at two Oxnard-area restaurants.

“She seemed like a very nice, little innocent girl,” said Ruth Lowe, an assistant manager at Keely’s Restaurant. “I said, ‘Honey, I’ll give you a chance’ and she said, ‘That’s all I asked for.’ ” But even working the relatively slow night shift, “she couldn’t cut it here,” Lowe said.

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s detective, who interviewed Graham eight days before her death, when she reported being raped, said Graham revealed an aimless character.

“She wasn’t doing anything with her life,” Detective Marian Holland said. “She didn’t appear to have any goals. . . . I felt that she probably had been a victim most of her life.”

Jordan’s Marriage

In November, 1981, about the same time that Jacquie Graham was reeling from her brother’s death, Richard Heywood Jordan was getting married in San Diego.

He had worked steadily as a typesetter since 1979, according to documents filed in the divorce case.

But his marriage to Alison Coutts Jordan, 35, soon soured. In a declaration that was not refuted in the case file of their divorce, she alleged that her husband suffered drinking bouts that were often accompanied by physical and verbal abuse.

Less than a year after being married, the couple separated for three months. During that time Richard Jordan tried to commit suicide, but he also sought alcoholism treatment and then reunited with his wife, the court record indicated.

“I was excited and hopeful,” Alison Jordan said in the declaration. “He truly seemed like a changed person, open and repentant. . . . Two months later, I found out I was pregnant.” Within another month, her husband “was drinking and bringing liquor back into the house,” she said.

The divorce was granted in December, along with joint custody of the couple’s 4-year-old daughter. Richard Jordan had declared a yearly income of $24,000.

Jordan has been held without bail since being arrested at his workplace on Sunset Boulevard.

The Last Day

Hurst’s last day with Graham began with a Sunday drive along the Pacific Coast Highway and into the Santa Monica area, he said. They were low on gas by the time they doubled back to Sepulveda Boulevard. They stopped for a meal, probably her last, at a McDonald’s.

According to Hurst, it was Graham’s idea to turn to prostitution to help pay a $40 debt.

As they sat on the bus stop bench at Sepulveda Boulevard and Vanowen Street, they agreed that Hurst would stand nearby and jot down the license plate number of the car that would pick Graham up, he said.

A car pulled up. “She said, ‘I love you. I’ll see you in a little bit,’ ” Hurst said. He wrote the license plate number on a slip of paper and stuffed it into a cigarette pack.

When she had not returned hours after entering the car, Hurst reported her missing and gave the license plate number to police.

The next day, Graham was found dead near a baseball field in the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area. The license plate number led police to Jordan.

‘She Looked Too Young’

Holland, the sheriff’s detective, said she was shocked to learn that Graham’s death stemmed from prostitution, despite the 18-year-old’s apparent lack of direction.

“She looked too young and too immature to have thought of something like that herself,” Holland said.

There is evidence that Graham had sexual intercourse shortly before her death, said Diamond, a prosecutor in the case. But because any purported sex act with Jordan might have been by consent, Jordan has not been charged with rape and would not face the death penalty if convicted of murder, he said.

Diamond would not comment on whether Jordan is known to have been involved in other sex crimes in the past. According to the state Department of Corrections, Jordan was paroled from state prison in 1978 after serving 18 months for an assault conviction.

A man who identified himself as Jordan’s employer but did not give his name said that Jordan “has the respect and affection of his colleagues.”

Graham’s adoptive father, Green, said he holds no bitterness toward Hurst or Graham’s killer for what happened that July afternoon in Van Nuys.

“They were trying to make it on their own,” he said. “I wish she just could have called for money. Whenever she needed money, we could have always sent her some.”