"...I am an assistant gardener in Rock Creek Park. On the morning of 18 August I was working on the south lawn of the park, weeding some flower-beds. At around mid-day I had a 15-minute break. As it was very hot I bought a soda from one of the vendors in the park. I then sat down on a bench near Anderson House to drink the soda.
While I was drinking I saw a young woman enter the park through one of the entrances on 23rd Street. She was wearing a green summer dress and a pair of white sandals. She was carrying a folded-up blanket. The woman walked towards me and then headed off towards the creek. She attracted my attention because she was a very beautiful woman. I am certain that she was the woman who was later murdered.
After a while I returned to work, joining one of my fellow gardeners, Juan Esteban. The two of us had been working for a while together, maybe 15 minutes, when I noticed a man sitting on one of the benches nearby. He was wearing very heavy clothes: a thick woollen jumper and a heavy woollen hat. He looked like a New England fisherman. He even had a beard. It was red in colour but it looked like it was dyed. He seemed to be talking to himself. After a quarter-hour or so this man got up and walked away. He carried a bag with him. It was a plastic bag from Dulles Airport, This stuck in my mind because he did not look like he had the money to be travelling by plane. We get a lot of strange people hanging around the park from time to time so after the man was gone I thought nothing more of him.
At a few minutes after one o'clock I finished work for the day. My wife is off visiting her mother in New York so I was taking a half-day in order to collect my daughter from school. As I walked through the park I saw the man I had noticed earlier. He was leaving the park with the young woman I had seen when I took my break. I was surprised to see them both together. They did not seem a likely match. The man did not have his airport bag any longer and he seemed to be holding something against the woman's back. I think now that it may have been a gun but I am not sure of this as they were some distance away.
I left the park by the P Street gate. When I stepped onto the street I saw the man again. By now he was almost a block away from where I was standing. He was leaning into the back of a car and doing something. He looked like he was hammering at something. When he reached back I saw that there was blood all over his jumper. I shouted at him to stop and started running towards him. When the man saw me coming towards him he quickly closed the back of the car, then jumped into the driver's side and drove off. He was moving so fast that he knocked the hat from his head. I noticed that his hair was a different colour from his beard. His hair was grey and his beard, as I mentioned, was red.
I continued running towards the car, thinking that it might get stuck in traffic, but the man was lucky. He slipped into the traffic and pulled away before I got to him. Undeterred I ran back into the park, found Juan Esteban and told him what had happened. He got his truck and we drove around the park a couple of times to see if we could spot the mystery man but he was well gone.
At 1.33 p.m. I called the police and told them what had happened. I know this is the time I called because it is recorded in my cell-phone. The police told me to stay where I was and arrived about a half-hour later...".
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