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he imagined, people were “looser and less inhibited, less anxious about themselves.” Madelyn and Stanley struck him as more colorful, interesting, liberal-minded. “Closet bohemians, maybe,” he said. That evening, they smoked a lot of cigarettes and talked. “He had a slightly rotten sense of humor that I liked, a dirty mind,” McCord remembered of Stanley Dunham. “They weren’t your run-of-the-mill Ozzie and Harriet by any stretch of the imagination. I remember at one point, the conversation was getting goofy. We talked about a lot of things. I said something about prehensile toes. And Stanley turned it around and said ‘pretensile hose,’ making sort of a phallic reference. It was a silly little dirty joke. And immediately, I think Madelyn pretended to be offended and hissed, ‘Stanley!’” There was some discussion of the possibility that the Dunhams might leave Mercer Island after Stanley Ann’s graduation. Didn’t Madelyn mind dropping everything and starting over? McCord asked her. In an answer that would strike him years later as prescient in light of what became of Madelyn’s daughter, she said, “We Dunhams usually bob to the surface.”

That was true of Madelyn, certainly. When Stanley had enrolled at UC Berkeley, she had taken a job in the admissions office at the university while Stanley Ann was still a toddler. Back in Kansas, she had worked in a real estate office in Wichita. Mack Gilkeson, who knew her from Augusta, remembered running into her at a restaurant where she was working as a hostess. In Ponca City, even though Stanley was making enough money that Madelyn no longer needed to be employed, she announced to a relative that she was going back to work. “The evening cocktail hour gets earlier every day,” she said. “If I don’t work, I’ll turn into an alcoholic.” She modeled shoes, broadcast community news on the radio, may have worked for a newspaper, and got her first job in banking in Texas, Charles Payne told me. When the family moved to Seattle, she parlayed her banking experience into a job in the escrow department of a savings and loan. She was elegant, slim, and well dressed, and she enjoyed her work. At the same time, she kept close track of Stanley Ann’s grades. She seemed interested in enabling her daughter to go well beyond what she and Stanley had accomplished. Madelyn had inherited their mother’s intelligence, Charles Payne said. Ralph Dunham described her as brilliant. But if she was smarter than Stanley, some said, she was careful not to overplay that advantage in the interest of keeping the peace.

Stanley had brought the family west so he could take a job selling furniture in a department store in downtown Seattle. But he seemed to be around more than Madelyn. To Stanley Ann’s friends, he was handsome and jolly, yet Maxine Box described him “as you would a used-car salesman—blustery, but what is behind it all?” He would go a little too far to make Stanley Ann’s friends laugh. She was on the receiving end of a disproportionate share of his teasing. He was not averse to issuing orders. “I can’t do that because of my father,” Iona Stenhouse remembered Stanley Ann saying. “I have to be home because of my dad.” From an early age, she ran circles around him. She would trick him, he would become angry, she would play innocent, he would stomp up and down. “If she wanted to do something, he would say no for no reason,” one relative said. “She would say things she knew would irritate him. She was able with a straight face to tease him in a way that he didn’t know he was being teased, and he would get furious.” In high school, when she wanted to go out with a group of friends, she would enlist John Hunt to pretend to be her date and get her out of the house without too much fatherly interrogation. “When I’d get sucked into a conversation with Stan, she’d roll her eyes: ‘Don’t!’” John Hunt told me. He said, “Big Stan wanted to know about her life, her friends. She kept him locked off.” She was like a lot of her friends, Chip Wall said: “We wanted to get out from under the thumb of our parents.” Ralph Dunham was