‘Who killed Karen Bodine?’ Olympia billboard calls attention to mother’s unsolved homicide
“Who killed Karen Bodine?”
It’s a question detectives and the 37-year-old woman’s family and friends have now asked for well over a decade. A billboard recently displayed along Martin Way East in Olympia is now asking it of the public, too.
About a year ago, The Olympian published a detailed story on the state of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office investigation into Karen Bodine’s death and her family members’ search for justice and closure.
Bodine, a mother of three, was found slain on the shoulder of Littlerock Road Southwest, after daybreak on a January morning in 2007. The cause of her death was strangulation, and a homicide investigation commenced. In the years since, no arrests have been made but Bodine’s family members have remained motivated to find answers.
A true-crime festival in Seattle, CrowdSolve, renewed their hope last year. That festival brought new experts’ input and technology to the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office investigation, according to previous reporting, and prompted new tests on existing evidence.
According to Sheriff’s Detective Mickey Hamilton, who has been involved in the investigation since CrowdSolve, there are a handful of people of interest in the case.
People came in and out of a house near 14th Avenue Southeast and Golf Club Road in Lacey the night before Bodine was found dead, Hamilton said. The house is the last place she was “verifiably” seen alive, according to Hamilton.
Bodine was reportedly involved in “an altercation” that night with the owner of the house, who is one of the people of interest and was submitted to a polygraph test in 2007 that was inconclusive, Hamilton said. The homeowner’s DNA has been ruled out as a match for DNA samples recovered from her body, he said.
But new technology may be able to take one of the samples that includes DNA from multiple people, and isolate and identify those contributors, according to Hamilton. Detectives also aren’t ruling out that this was a group effort, he said.
Hamilton believes there are still people out there who know more about the case and haven’t come forward.
As the grim anniversary of her mother’s death approaches, Karen’s daughter Karlee Bodine recently had the billboard put up, hoping to draw renewed attention to the case.
She told The Olympian the idea of “armchair detectives” seems to be gaining popularity. She’s trying to hop on that bandwagon and get people to help solve her mom’s case.
“It’s pretty much out of desperation,” she said. “I’m willing to try anything and everything.”
Bodine, who manages a fast food restaurant in Olympia, is paying for the billboard — which she expects to stay up for at least 3-4 months and cost about $7,000 total — with a combination of her own money and donations.
She’s collecting money through the Venmo app (karlee_bodine), she said, to avoid paying fees associated with donation platforms. One of her mother’s childhood friends is also collecting money through a GoFundMe under Karen Bodine’s name, and passing those funds along to Karlee Bodine. If she receives more donations than are needed to pay for the billboard, she says any leftover money will go toward other efforts directly related to the case, such as hiring a private investigator.
“If I don’t get any donations, whatever, I’m tenacious,” Bodine said. “It’ll get paid for.”
Already, she said she’s collected roughly $1,400 or so in donations, which has “astounded her,” showing her it’s not just her and her family fighting for her mom.
”This community has not forgotten her,” she said. “It will be solved.”
The billboard also features the URL for a website, www.karenbodine.com, the domain for which Bodine said she recently purchased and through which she’s already received two tips about the case. She said a team of volunteers is building it out, and plans for it include her mother’s life story, what they think happened to her, and a space to submit tips and photos.
Anyone with information about the Bodine case is asked to call Det. Mickey Hamilton at 360-786-5279.
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