The cast iron frying pan is found in the garbage can in the shared kitchen, shattered into pieces and covered in the blood of Valerie Seavey McMullin's son.
It was May 2020. Wilbur Tankersley had been out of rehab for three weeks. But McMullin hadn't visited her son yet, and she had no idea that he's running out of time; his grandparents told her that they haven't "seen him that happy in forever."
Wilbur had lived on his own once before, back during a three-year stint when he was still taking his meds. But the medication made him feel less human, less normal, so he quit taking them — and he went downhill. Wilbur was 18 when he was first diagnosed with schizophrenia.
But two years ago, he once again had a spot to call his own — a room in downtown Spokane at a place called the Wolfe Apartments.
"We thought it was a great, reputable place," Seavey McMullin says.
A better place than rehab, a better place than the House of Charity or Union Gospel Mission, and certainly better than the street.
"He was constantly trying to sleep in a sleeping bag downtown, and he was arrested several times for that," Seavey McMullin says.
But just a few weeks after moving into the Wolfe Apartments in 2020, he was murdered.
Cameron Walker, another 24-year-old tenant at the Wolfe, had called 911 on Tankersley for being disorderly. Tankersley, other witnesses said, appeared to be having a mental crisis, talking to himself, saying threatening things, even striking a pipe against a wall. But Walker was the one who actually got violent.
There's little question about what happened. Walker confessed, directly to the police: "I beat a man's head with a skillet until his soul left his body."
Walker's defense attorney, Jeffrey Leslie, reads a message to the Inlander from a doctor who determined "with a fair amount of confidence" that Walker had schizophrenia too.
You can have all the facts, but that doesn't mean you understand. In dozens of ways, Seavey McMullin and her family try to make sense of what happened.
They seek out justice. The family wants Walker to go on trial. They sit in a room with Spokane County Prosecutor Larry Haskell and beg for one. But Walker takes a plea instead, getting 22 years in prison. The family is devastated.
They go to the scene of the crime. But the people manning the door at the Wolfe won't let Seavey McMullin or her family see where Tankersley was killed, she says. He doesn't have anything in his room left to collect.
"They said they threw everything in the garbage," Seavey McMullin says. "And I said, 'Well, can I go get it out of the garbage?' They said, 'No, the garbage already came.'"
She knows that her son loved to draw — abstract drawings, but brimming with meaning. She doesn't care if those drawings are covered in blood. She finds it devastating that they were thrown away.
The family conducts their own sort of investigation. A childhood friend comes to Spokane and stakes out the Wolfe, watching it all day. He strikes up a conversation with the tenants, trying to figure out what he can learn about the place. Seavey McMullin digs in, too.
"I found that it is not a reputable place," she says. "In fact, it is as shady as eff."
Seavey McMullin grabs her own cast-iron skillet and walks out into the street. And as hard as she can, she smashes the skillet into the asphalt — over and over and over again — almost a recreation of the kind of violence that killed her son. And yet, at the end of it, her skillet is barely damaged. She can't fathom the kind of force Walker must have used.
But there's something else she doesn't quite understand: Why she doesn't hate Walker.
"I think it's weird," Seavey McMullin says. "You think I'd be angry. You'd think I'd want to hurt him — you think I'd... but I had nothing. There was nothing."
She seeks meaning in her faith: Maybe this was mercy. Maybe God spared her the burden of that kind of anger on top of that grief.
"He's not suffering with schizophrenia anymore. He's not struggling to find a place," Seavey McMullin says of her son. "He's in a better place."
When cops arrive, they find a spatter of Wilbur Tankersley's blood is splashed across the victim's Bible. They drop the book into an evidence bag and place it in property storage.
"Wilbur was very close to God," she says. "As close as he could be."
And that, at least, gives her comfort. ♦
