The TikTok Suitcase Murder Mystery
A fun adventure quickly turns into a grisly discovery on a Seattle beach.
The Scene
It was a warm, sunny Friday in June near Alki Beach in West Seattle, when a group of teenagers thought it would be exciting to document their discovery after “Randonauting” in the area.
What They Found…
Upon approaching the shoreline, one of the teenagers spots a small black suitcase balanced on the rocks. The tide is moving in, pulling the small item back with it into the ocean. At first the teens are seen joking, having no idea what they are about to uncover. The video then shows the young woman descend the rocks with a stick in hand. She proceeds to unzip, and peel open the case as her friends film her, only to be met with an overwhelming odor that quickly reveals something more sinister than they were expecting. After police arrived and searched the scene, more human remains were found, and the area was immediately closed off.
Wtf is Randonauting?
Randonauting is the act of using the Randonautica app to travel to random places near you based on a “quantum random number generator and mother nature”, which gives specific coordinates for you to follow.
When you open the app you start by setting a radius and the generator will spit out coordinates for you to travel to. The apps introduction video claims that these locations can be “influenced by the users thoughts and consciousness”.
This is why, while setting up the app, it asks whether you’d visit attractors (highly concentrated quantum-points), voids (sparse quantum-points), anomalies (reported patterns of areas influenced by thought) and urges you to “focus on your intent” while the app sets a location for you.
The New York Times described it as: “Think: The law of attraction meets geocaching.”
Two weeks earlier…
A young woman arrived at a residence in Seattle on the late evening of June 9th to meet landlord, Michael Lee Dudley, about a room he’d advertised for rent. When he came to help her with her luggage, she noticed his glasses were broken, and he had scratches on his face.
Dudley proceeded to take her to the available unit called the “blue room.” She told police that after taking a shower, she opened the door to her new bedroom and saw “heaps of clothing” in the middle of the floor — and a hand sticking out from underneath.
She said Dudley told her later that night that he needed to “clean up the mess”, and asked if he could take her somewhere else; as they were leaving, she saw him laying out large sheets of plastic in the basement.
When she asked him about it, he told her: “Let’s put it this way, his gun misfired and mine didn’t,” the police report states.
Detectives interviewed neighbors who claimed that they’d called police earlier that same night after hearing gunfire (20 days before their bodies were found) and a male yelling from inside the residence, “please don’t do this, just let me leave.” Burien Police had responded to the call but got no response when they arrived at the residence.
Detectives obtained phone records of the victims and learned that their phones stopped transmitting or receiving data on June 9th at approximately 1908 hrs (7:08 pm). One of the last calls from the victim’s phone was to Dudley at 1901 hrs and that call pinged off a cell tower within a mile of his residence at 16466 Ambaum Blvd.
Detectives learned from witnesses that Dudley had been renting a room to the victims but wanted them to leave and had been fighting with them since they couldn’t pay rent during the pandemic, and were — according to Dudley — engaging in criminal activity.
Detectives were able to gain a search warrant for 16466 Ambaum Blvd So. and it was served on August 19th. During the service of the warrant CSI detectives found bullet holes, bullet strikes, spent rounds and blood which was located in the “blue” room.” It was also apparent that the room had been recently cleaned and freshly painted. During the course of his interview with homicide, Dudley confirmed certain details but denied any involvement in the couple’s murder. When asked about the blood, he said Jessica had cut herself earlier that day but he could not explain the bullet holes and empty casings which matched his 9mm handgun.
The remains were later identified as Jessica Lewis, a 36-year-old mother of four, and her 27-year-old boyfriend, Austin Wenner. And according to police, Wenner died of a single gunshot, while Lewis was shot multiple times. They were then chopped up and dumped in the suitcases.
A Shady Past
It wasn’t Dudley’s first brush with the law. Back in 2016 he was arrested and charged for assault in a domestic violence dispute after beating up his then girlfriend, Marlys Gordon while holding a gun. She attests to his violent past and says, “He started to hit me and grabbed my hair and grabbed my head…threw me and my stuff out on his patio…hit my head again…with one hand while holding his gun in the other.”
Gina Jaschke, another witness and Jessica Lewis’s aunt, claims that her knowledge of Dudley more or less tracks with the allegations made by his own daughter. “Sometimes he would break their car so they couldn’t leave,” she said–describing him with various epithets. “He put trackers on people’s cars. Anytime he ever got in a dispute with anybody he would tell them to leave but try to lock them in the house.”
Dudley’s backstory suggests a history of sexual abuse and incest; Dudley’s daughter filed a sexual assault restraining order against him in June 2018. Filed in Pierce County Superior Court, the document accused Dudley of sexually assaulting his daughter for nearly a decade.
“[Dudley] Sexually assaulted me for 9 years from age 10 until 18 (2007) by drugging and raping me,” she alleged. “Forcing me to share a bed with him from age 10, and making me watch him masturbate while he watched pornography.”
“I don’t feel safe in my home. Or leaving my home to work,” his daughter added–while also describing a disturbing tendency. Dudley allegedly frequently took out his gun and threatened to use it.
Dudley allegedly had another disturbing and typically telling tendency: cruelty toward animals.
“He killed the dog in front of them and left the carcass outside for three days to scare them,” Jaschke continued. “They had nowhere to go. That’s why they stayed there. He beat this dog to death with a hammer because it got one of his chickens…he just left it out there for the other dogs to look at and sniff. He’s a freaking psycho.”
Charged: Michael Lee Dudley
He was formally charged with two counts of murder in the second degree, for the death and dismemberment of Austin Wenner and Jessica Lewis, by the King County Prosecutor on September 8th 2020. He pleaded not guilty.
While no other suspects have been named, State forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Taylor told Seattle police she believed there were multiple people involved. Cuts on Lewis and Wenner’s bodies were ‘disorganized’ and appeared to be done in different manners with various devices.
The case setting hearing was initially scheduled for 1 p.m. Oct. 1st. Dudley remains in King County Jail on $5 million bail.
Details to follow as they develop.
