One Dildo From Murder

Dildo Deer Park, in Spokane County, Washington. On December 3, 2011, police were called to do a 2nd welfare check at the home of a woman who had been reported missing. The day before they had been to the home after her ex-husband had called police asking them to check in on her because she hadn’t picked up their younger kids from school and no one had been able to reach her. Nothing had appeared wrong and the home, it was locked up with the lights off, so police determined everything was ok. After receiving pressure from the woman’s family, the police went back to the home a 2nd time with her landlord. This time they entered the home and discovered the woman dead in her bedroom. She was naked, severely beaten and her body had been staged in a very humiliating, sexualized way with a sex toy. The victim was 42-year-old Chanin Denice Conway Starbuck. She was classically beautiful: tall, long blonde hair, big blue eyes, beautiful smile. Friends described her a dedicated mother to her children, classy, kind, always had time for a friend. She was born April 19, 1969, in Indiana and had 2 brothers and a sister. After her parents were divorced, she moved with her mother to Florida where she graduated from HS and then got an associate’s degree in Art Therapy from Florida State University. She met Clay Starbuck who was on vacation in Florida but from Alaska where he worked on the pipeline. They hit it off, got married just a few months later in 1990 and Chanin moved with him to Alaska. Chanin, who was about 21 at the time, got pregnant with on their honeymoon. Clay still worked in Alaska, and Chanin was Mormon and Clay was not, so they were not on the same page as far as religion. They named their 1st son Austin and a few years later had a 2nd son named Blake, then daughters Loghan and Sutton. But after 10 years of marriage, their differences got the best of them and Clay and Chanin got divorced in 2000. They did their best to co-parent together. It was said that they ran very hot and cold. When they got along it was great, and when they didn’t, it was not good. They rekindled their romance and got remarried in 2006. They moved to Deer Park, Washington and had another son, Marshall. Clay commuted to Aslaska to his job. So he was gone for weeks at a time and this put a strain on their relationship. He would come home and play with the kids to bond with them and she was the full-time parent and disciplinarian. Clay was quoted saying Chanin referred to him as a “Disneyland Dad”. They ended up filing divorcing a 2nd time in 2010. Clay moved to a house less than a mile away and the 2 older boys went with him they were about 20 & 17, while Chanin stayed in the home they had shared, was granted custody of their 3 younger kids. Clay was ordered to pay child support and maintenance. But in 2011 as the divorce was being finalized, Clay suffered from a back injury and was out of work on disability. At that point he was around a lot more and was involved in taking the youger kids to and from school, taking them on weekends, being more than the “Disneyland dad” he had been before. So now Chanin is 42 years old, twice divorced and had 5 children with ages raging from 12-21. In order to gain financial independence, Chanin went back to school and had just graduated as a certified as a dental hygienist. Friends and family had encouraged her to start dating, nothing serious, she had been almost exclusively with Clay since she was 21, the entire adult half of her life. They encouraged her to date around, have fun, see what was out there. On the afternoon of December 1st, 2011, Chanin didn’t show up to pick up her kids from school. She wasn’t responding to calls or texts. Her eldest son, 21 year old Austin, got a message from his younger sister Loghan saying their mom hadn’t come to pick them up and she wasn’t answering her phone. So left work and picked up his younger siblings and brought them to their father’s house where they stayed that night. The next day, Clay Starbuck asked police to go to Chanin’s house to do a welfare check. The officer that went to the house got no answer and nothing appeared out of place or unusual, so he left. It was highly unusual for Chanin to be unreachable. She spoke with her mother in Florida almost daily. When her mother realized no one seen Chanin since she dropped her kids off at school 2 days before and that her voicemail box was full, she knew something was wrong and begged police to do another welfare check at the home. That’s when Chanin’s body was found. The crime scene: There was no forced entry, and nothing else in the home appeared to have been disturbed. It was suspected that Chanin knew her killer. She was found naked on her bed, posed after being killed in a sexually provocative position with a sex toy. There was a gun safe in her room that was open displaying a number of sex toys. Many of the first responders commented on how shocking and awful the scene was. It was obviously it was meant to humiliate her. Chanin’s body was posed on the bed on the mattress pad, the sheets were missing – and found in the washing machine – and the blankets from the bed were folded on the floor. There only a little staining on the mattress pad, so it was likely the killer removed the sheets to wash them and destroy evidence. So it was determined that the staging of her body would have taken time, so the killer would have had to have known they had time to spend. She had been severely beaten, tortured and from the bruising she appeared to have been strangled, so before they moved her body they swabbed her neck for DNA. Police suspected that she had showered just before she was attacked, as there were no clothes nearby and her hair looked as though it had been wet and then dried as she was on the bed. Investigators hoped they would get a clean DNA sample from her if she had just showered before being attacked. While the scene was still being processed, Clay Starbuck showed up the house. He was demanding to talk to the lead detective and find out what was going on. As her ex, he was no longer next of kin and they wouldn’t tell him what was found in the house. They had to keep him from going beyond the yellow tape. They asked him to go to the station to speak to the detective and give a statement. When the detective told Clay Chanin had been found dead he practically collapsed on the ground in apparent grief. Clay told them no one had been able to reach Chanin for more than 2 days, which was very unusual. Clay denied having anything to do with Chanin’s murder. He told detectives that he and Chanin had a great co-parenting relationship. They would often messaging each other about trading weekends or trading who was taking the kids to and from school. He reported that Chanin was a good mother, very attentive. When asked who would have reason to harm Chanin, Clay kept insisting that detectives look at Chanin’s phone and computer to see who she had been talking to. He knew his ex-wife had been using dating sites to meet men. He believed she had a dating profile on a site for Mormon singles. He said this was why that first day she didn’t show up to get the kids, he and the kids were more annoyed than worried. They assumed she had been out with a man and lost track of time, or she had gotten mixed up and thought Clay was picking up the kids. Loghan had even left a voice message on Chanin’s phone in an annoyed tone saying “please come home”. Then on December 2nd one of the Starbuck kids texted their grandma, Chanin’s mom, Melanie Bourcier (bore-cee-ay) in Florida asking if she had heard from Chanin. She had not, she tried texting Chanin and didn’t get a response, which was unusual. And then when she called and it said her VM was full, Melanie said she knew something was wrong. She kept trying to reach her daughter. Clay called the police asking them to do a welfare check at Chanin’s home that night. That’s when police saw a closed up, dark house with nothing apparently wrong. So on the morning of December 3rd, Melanie called the Spokane County Sheriff’s office and begged them to go back over to Chanin’s house with the landlord and check inside the house. The medical examiner confirmed that Chanin was strangled and died of asphyxiation. And it was noted to many’s surprise that Chanin had not been raped. Unfortunately the ME could not determine an accurate time of death, because her body was already cold when she was discovered. Her injuries were so severe that her family couldn’t have an open-casket funeral. While Clay told police he was happy for Chain to go back to school and start dating, her friends had a different perspective. The girls she went to school with reported that while she presented herself as an upbeat, religious, family-focused, devoted mom, in the months leading up to her murder, they noticed changes in her. She was very up and down. Sometimes they would find her in the parking lot before school crying. She admitted that she was dating a few guys online. Nothing serious. And they were all horrified to hear about her brutal murder and sad and embarrassed for her to be found in such a humiliating manor. Chanin’s phone had been on her nightstand next to the bed where she was found. When police searched the phone, they began to build a timeline. The last time Chanin had been seen alive was the morning of December 1st when she dropped her kids off at school, but it was actually supposed to have been Clay’s turn to drive them. On her cellphone there was a text from Clay saying he had car trouble and needed her to take the kids to school. There were more texts back and forth about who would then pick them up. When asked, Clay told investigators that on December 1st, his car had broken down on a road in Deer Park, and that he spent the day walking back and forth from his car to his house to get tools to fix it. But she had been texting with at least 2 other men on the days leading up to her murder. And they were some very sexually suggestive texts, not at all in line with the picture that family and friends had painted of Chanin. She received a text message at 8:06am from a Tom Walker that said “Good Morning Sexy” and she replied “Good morning handsome” at 8:29am, Tom texted asking Chanin to send him a photo of her in a sexual position, with a device… and it was eerily similar to the position her body had been found in. Chanin had not taken or sent the requested picture. She didn’t respond to him at all after that. Detectives messaged Tom Walker and asked to interview him. He was very willing to talk to investigators, said he had nothing to hide. He was a car salesman who had met Chanin online. He admitted to sexting with Chanin the morning she disappeared, but was at work all day that day except for a funeral that he had attended. He readily gave them a DNA sample. The other man Chanin had been in contact with that day went by the name John Wilson. There were voicemails from him, messages and emails. In those messages John and Chanin had been making plans to meet up that day. When they looked him up, they found his FB profile and dating profiles were fake accounts, his name and picture had been stolen from a doctor who lived in NYC. Detectives contacted him using the email address Chanin was using to message him. He refused to give them him identity. So they used a reverse directory the numbers this person had used to call Chanin. They all came from public payphones or locations. This person was going to great lengths to hide their identity. But there was one number they traced to a payphone outside of the library at Washington State University and there happened to be a surveillance camera pointed in the direction of the payphone. Detectives were able to get an image of a man walking to the payphone just before the call to Chanin’s phone. So, they messaged the fake John Walker again and said he either come forward with his identity, or they would put his image on TV and ask the public for help identifying him. Less than 20 minutes later the mystery man contacted police. He told them his name was John Kenlein (Ken-line). All the secrecy was because he was married and a high school teacher. He admitted to dating Chanin, and he said he had been to her house. Not only that, but he was there at 10:30am on December 1st. They had made a plan for him to come over, but when he arrived, she didn’t answer. So he drove to a payphone, called and got her VM and left a message. Then he went back to her house. This time he tried looking thru her windows but couldn’t see anything, even saying the shutters were closed, which was unusual – so it sounded like he’d been to her house before. He left and tried texting her a few hours later, and this time she replied “Did you come over?” And then suggested they get together later that night. But John Kenlein said he never heard from her after that, they never met up and that he never saw her on December 1st or any time after that. Unfortunately he didn’t have any other alibi for his whereabouts that day, there wasn’t anyone who could say that they saw him. So he’s being open and helpful, but still a suspect. So they began digging thru all John and Chanin’s past communications. Police found that Chanin had continued to others throughout the day. Her last message was at 3:17pm to Clay, asking him to pick up the kids at school that day. That was December 1st, 2 days before her body was found. So they narrowed down her time of death to sometime after she sent that text. Then, almost 3 weeks after Chanin was murdered, police received her cell phone records and discover that a call to 911 was made at 9:17 on the morning of December 1st. This was a surprise because the 911 call had not been properly filed with the sheriff’s office, and her cell phone had not shown a call being made to 911. Her cell phone had a safety feature that did not show in the call log if you dialed 911 so that if you were in an emergency situation like a kidnapping, the perpetrator wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at the phone. When they get the recording of the 911 call it was only 28 seconds long. You hear the recording begin and a gasp or ugh from a woman, then, as the operator is saying “911 what’s your emergency” you can hear a muffled female voice making a few more noises like there is a struggle and then the call ends. The operator followed protocol by calling the number back, but it went straight to voicemail. And 1 minute later her cell phone lost contact with the cell tower, which means the phone had likely been turned off. There was nothing more the 911 operator could do at that point, there was no way at that time to know where the call may have come from to send police help. So detectives use the 911 call to establish a timeline and possible time of death as sometime soon after 9:17am. But there had been text messages sent from Chanin’s phone after that time up until just after 3pm that day. If Chanin was killed around 9:17am on December 1st, Tom Walker who asked for the dirty picture was at work and then at a funeral and his cell phone showed he was nowhere near Deer Park at that time. And John Kenlein had admitted to being at her house at 10:30am But at 9:17 when she called 911, he was actually at a Starbucks several towns over getting coffee. Police were able to use the store’s receipts to confirm he ordered his specific cappuccino order right around 9:17am. So he was ruled out as well. But her ex-husband Clay Starbuck did not. When they had thought she was killed after her last text message was sent to Clay, he had the alibi of being home with his kids that afternoon and evening. But if she was killed in the morning, that’s when Clay was fixing his car. ******Begin part 2 So detectives began to look deeper into Clay Starbuck. They got a very different side of the relationship from Chanin’s friends and family. Chanin’s home had been broken into several times, but that either minor things were missing or stuff would just be moved around. They presented police reports Chanin had files with each break-in, she told them she suspected it was her ex-husband. The incidents were investigated but nothing came of them. Clay denied all the break-ins, claimed he was in Alaska on at least 1 of the times it happened. Chanin told her friends and family that she was scared of Clay, convinced he was entering her home just to unnerve her, spy on her, let her know he could get to her. Chanin’s siblings reported that Clay was very controlling and jealous. The reason for both divorces was due to Clay accusing Chanin of cheating on him. The 2nd divorce was very messy. There was a lot of tension between them in the months before her murder, not the happy co-parenting he had described. Her family testified that Clay refused to pay Chanin the child support he owed her, which was over $9,000. He blamed it on being out on disability. She was going to food banks and using food stamps. Her mother and siblings sent her money to pay for her rent and utilities, for her to go back to school to become a hygienist to better support herself and provide for her kids. Then her school friends told police that Chanin had shown up to school very upset one day. She had found a giftbag hanging on her doorknob, with a note from Clay that said something like “If I can’t have you, enjoy this” and inside was a sex toy. Another friend said she commented a few times that she thought Clay might kill her. And that one day she found that the windows of her car had been shot out while it was sitting in her driveway. After that she changed the locks to the house and didn’t even have keys made for the kids. Investigators looked into Clay’s alibi of his car that broke down about a mile away from his house. He said he spent the day walking back and forth from his car to his house 4 times. There were no witnesses who saw him or his car that day. And, his cell phone was off for most of the day, so they couldn’t see where it pinged for his location. They did find a house with a camera pointed at the street where Clay supposedly walked, and there was no video of him on that camera. This was suspicious, but not enough to arrest him. Then about 2 months after her murder, the lab results came back on the swabs from Chanin’s neck, under her fingernails as well as other items from the scene. Some results came back as unknown male. But a DNA profile had been developed from a process known as Y-STR DNA, which targets the Y chromosome found in male DNA. That profile came back as a match to a male Starbuck. Meaning Clay, Austin or Blake Starbuck. Both of the older Starbuck boys has solid alibis for the time of their mother’s murder being either at work or school. On Feb 6, 2012, police arrested Clay Starbuck and charged him with her murder. Now the underaged Starbuck children had no guardian. Chanin’s siblings in Florida wanted to take them in and get them away from Washington and all that had happened, but the oldest, Austin, who was 21, petitioned the court for guardianship to keep them all together so they could fight for their dad’s innocence – even if it meant dragging their mother’s name thru the mud. And it was granted. The older boys became very vocal about what they considered their mother’s double-life. Austin told Keith Morrison of Dateline she had one persona for home and church. But that her online persona was much more risqué. They watched dateline and To Catch a Predator, they thought their mom was playing with fire. Austin swears he figured out his mother’s secret double life when he was 8 years old, that she had a string of men for very brief relationships. All 5 Starbuck children believe in their dad’s innocence and that he still loved their mother. He was the only who was made miserable in their marriage. That she would periodically leave their dad and take them to live with other men for short periods of time. And then their dad would take her back. He had even said thru the last divorce that he still loved her and would take her back. On top of all this, another hurtful secret was revealed. Marshall Starbuck, the youngest, found out thru DNA testing that Clay was not his biological father. He was conceived during a relationship Chanin had after their first divorce. Clay’s explanation for his DNA found on Chanin was that he used to live at the house. And that just because he and Chanin had divorced, they had still been intimate as recently as a few weeks before her murder and that it was likely a casual transfer of his DNA or that of any of their male children. But prosecutor’s disagreed and trusted the DNA analyst’s opinion that if Chanin had just gotten out of the shower, it extremely likely it was fresh DNA from whoever strangled her. The murder trial began in May of 2013. Clay pleaded innocent and all 5 of their children supported their father. There was a lot of tension in the courtroom with Chanin’s mother and siblings on one side and the kids sitting behind their father, on the opposite side from their grandmother, aunt and uncles. Prosecutors presented the jury with a timeline for their theory on Chanin’s murder. On the morning of December 1st, Clay was supposed to take the kids to school, but he texted Chanin saying he was having car trouble and asked her to take them. While she was out of the house he snuck in and waited. When Chanin returned she took a shower and when she got out Clay attacked her. At some point he turned off her cell phone. After torturing, beating and strangling her, he cleaned up by washing the sheets and wiped down the washing machine. Then Clay turned her cell phone back on and checked her messages. He then posed her body based on the photo request from Tom Walker to fool police while also humiliate his ex-wife out of jealousy. He also sent several messages from Chanin’s phone to make it appear as if she had been alive for several more hours that day. This also helped him establish his alibi. They played the brief 911 call for the jury. The detectives testified that they felt something was off on the first day they interviewed Clay. It was their opinion that Clay was too upset upon hearing Chanin was murdered. He was crying hysterically, wailing and that it went on and on. And they found it odd that when they were done interviewing him and said he could leave, he wouldn’t leave. He kept pushing them to look at her phone and computer. That everything they needed to know they would find on there. Over and over. Directing them to look into Chanin’s personal life. Chanin’s friends and family testified to Clay’s controlling and jealous behavior. How he stalked and terrorized Chanin, withheld money from her. That he owed her over $9000. So by killing Chanin, Clay would no longer have that debt hanging over him. Then they brought witnesses that testified to that Clay was jealous that Chanin was dating and moving on. That Clay seemed obsessed with Chanin’s dating life, complaining about how many men she was seeing. And one of the Starbuck kid’s teachers testified that she hear Clay say “I wouldn’t be surprised if we found her dead with her throat slit open”. John Kenlein testified that he was having a sexual relationship with Chanin and that he had received text messages from Chanin’s phone, after the time of the 911 call, likely to lure him to the house. And to further prove that it was Clay that was pretending to be Chanin texting, they entered into evidence a message sent at 3:06pm to Loghan Starbuck that said “Send Marsh a note dad will be there in 10 minutes”. Well it was well known that only Clay used the nickname Marsh for their son Marshall. It was the prosecution’s view that Clay Starbuck had been a jealous ex-husband who killed his ex-wife to get out of paying her the money he owed. She had been killed in a very brutal, personal matter, someone who was angry with her. And then she had been grotesquely posed to shame and humiliator her for the personal life that he couldn’t stand. And to top it off, jurors were told that detectives had found Chanin’s death certificate pinned up on a wall in Clay’s house, as a reminder that she was no longer a problem. Clay Starbuck’s public defenders felt the investigators ignored Chanin’s risqué double-life and homed in on Clay from the beginning. They believed the evidence on Chanin’s phone and laptop showed a woman who was a sexual deviant, involved in very risky behavior. Having purely sexual, casual relationships with men she barely knew, just met online. They found evidence videos and photos from these communications. They verified at least 10 men that Chanin was communicating with via email or text in the month leading up to her murder, and most of them she then met up with in person. They criticized detectives for not following up on what they considered multiple potential suspects. However, just before they were about to put on their defense, the judge ruled the laptop evidence was inadmissible because it was speculative and prejudicial. So the jury wasn’t allowed to hear any of it. The defense team had to quickly change tactics and instead attack the police investigation. They claimed that there was only trace male Starbuck DNA on Chanin and it could have come from any one of them at any time since they had all lived in that house at some point. They claimed that not all the evidence collected was tested. That one of Chanin’s fingernails tested positive for blood, but it wasn’t tested for a DNA profile. They pointed out that some of the swabs came back with unidentified male DNA including the face of Chanin’s cell phone and her neck. And they did find someone to testify to seeing Clay’s car on the side of the road on December 1st. Eldest son Austin testified that his father regularly turned off his phone during the day to not be disturbed when he slept. And he was sleeping and resting a lot since he had just had surgery from his back injury. Clay’s doctor testified that he wouldn’t have been strong enough after that surgery to beat and strangle Chanin. Austin also testified that the death certificate pinned on the wall was his, that he had pinned it up to keep it safe. He was the executor of Chanin’s estate and he pinned it to the wall in the master bedroom closet that they used as a gun safe because it had a door that locked. And Clay testified in his own defense, and said that he never told the detectives what route he walked back and forth from his car, so that’s why he wasn’t seen on that home monitoring video. He said that he was out of work from his back injury and with no money coming in he had fallen behind on child support. That’s why he was supportive of Chanin going back to school to bring in money for their children. And that any negative comments made about her personal life were out of concern. Clay and his attorneys were so confident they had instilled reasonable doubt in the jury that Clay did an interview with Keith Morrison of Dateline before the trial ended. In his interview Keith Morrison was very calm, unrattled saying that the investigation was botched. That police wanted him to be the killer and so that’s how the steered the investigation. He said that he moved out of the house in June 2011, but that wasn’t the last time he was in the house or had been intimate with Chanin. But that was casual too, he was in a long distance relationship with someone in Alaska. He was so calm and even keeled, that it was odd. Keith even said in the interview, he was a hard guy to argue with, which clay replyed “I’m an easy guy to argue with because I don’t argue” and Keith was like “that’s the problem! It makes you crazy!” Clay said he wasn’t angry or jealous. Just disappointed. Especially when their youngest daughter told him about some explicit images she saw on Chanin’s computer. But even that wasn’t upsetting. Just disappointing. He ended the interview confident he would be reunited with his kids by the following week. June 2013, Clay Starbuck was found guilty of 1st degree murder and sexually violated a corpse after a day of deliberation. He was sentenced to life without parole. Clay filed an appeal and 2 years later in 2015 he lost the appeal. He has not been allowed contact with his younger children The kids still believe their father is innocent. The 2nd oldest, Blake had another theory on his mother’s murder. He believes she may have been killed by serial killer Israel Keys, who was arrested after Clay was arrested – so at the time he wasn’t known to authorities. Israel Keys confessed to a number of murders that have not been confirmed, but he said he murdered 4 people in Washington. He was from a town not far from Deer Park. But that’s just Blake’s theory. In December 2021, Clay and Chanin’s daughter Loghan, who was then 25, was reported missing. It was reported that Loghan was on the autism spectrum and had a caretaker, but was a very determined to be self-sufficient. She had just moved into her own apartment. She had worked hard to get her driver’s license, a job and a car. The year before she started taking testosterone and began transitioning. She told her family her goal was to have surgery and they were supportive. I want to state here that the article I read used the pronouns she/her as did her brother Blake in all of his quotes in the article. So taking that lead, I’m going to also use she and her. Austin reported that Loghan been having a very difficult year in 2021. She had been in several benders, her license had been suspended, she lost her job, she went thru a painful breakup. Then when December came it was the 10th anniversary of her mother’s murder, from which she also ended up losing her father. In February 2022, Loghan’s body was pulled out of the Spokane river. She had died from an apparent suicide. Sources: Forensic Files II, S1 E11 “Last Gasp” Dateline Secrets Uncovered S9 E19 “A Cold December Morning” Find a grave .com Nbc news .com The spokesman review .com