The Lakewood Monster

Cynthia Allinger, called Cindy, was nine. She and two younger sisters lived with their mother at the Garden Court Apartments near McChord Air Force Base in Lakewood, Washington. On July 4, 1996, she left home in a white dress printed with pink flowers to visit friends nearby and did not come back. Detectives looked almost immediately at a former neighbor, Guy Matthew Rasmussen.

Rasmussen was 30, played in a rock band, and was known to children in the area through his Akita. He had convictions from 1982 and 1990 for sexual assaults on a 16-year-old and a 10-year-old, and he gave police contradictory accounts of whether he knew Cindy. After she was reported missing he tore up drawings she had made for him. On July 17 her body was found in a weedy lot about half a mile from the apartments, wrapped in old carpet. She had been raped and suffocated.

Blood on a pair of cut-off jeans taken from his home matched Cindy’s genetic markers, and he was arrested that November, more than four months after she disappeared. A Pierce County jury convicted him of aggravated first-degree murder in February 1999. Two jurors refused to vote for death, so on February 20 the judge imposed the mandatory term of life without parole. The Washington Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in 2002.