Parents have finally found end to case

The families of most murder victims don’t get the treatment a Spokane couple received last week in a Seattle courtroom at the conclusion of a 26-year-old cold case.

Just minutes after a jury had found William Bergen Greene guilty of first-degree murder, the 12-member panel sent a bailiff out to scour the courthouse hallways to find Sam and Joan Durante.

The Spokane couple, who are both 79, are the parents of Sylvia Durante, a Ferris High School graduate whom Greene murdered in 1979 in her Seattle apartment.

The Durantes had sat through the entire trial, joined in front-row seats by their two surviving daughters and a son, all of Spokane.

After the verdict in King County Superior Court, the Durantes stood in the hallway, overwrought with emotion, gratified that someone finally had been convicted of the strangulation rape-murder of their 25-year-old daughter.

“It was a scene of joy, that the right decision had been made,” Sam Durante recalled Monday. “And there were a few tears, too, of course.

The Durantes spent 90 minutes informally talking with the jurors and alternates.

Sam Durante was the lead-off prosecution witness in the three-week trial.

He told the jury about his daughter, who had moved to Seattle about four years before she was murdered.

The killer apparently had targeted the young woman after the two had enrolled in the same stained-glass class, Seattle detectives Greg Mixsell and Richard Gagnon concluded.

The jury spent five hours before returning its verdict Wednesday against Greene, a previously convicted rapist who is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole as a three-strikes offender.

Greene has claimed 24 different personalities live in his head and are responsible for his crimes, which include a 1994 sexual attack on his counselor. Because a mental defense wasn’t raised, the jury wasn’t allowed to hear about the defendant’s multiple-personality disorder.

But the jury did hear from the counselor whom Greene had raped. She diagnosed Greene with multiple-personality disorder after she had begun treating him when he was sent to prison in 1988 after twice being convicted of indecent liberties.

The jury also heard from two other women who had been sexually assaulted by Greene in a pattern similar to evidence found in the Durante case.

Deputy Prosecutor Erin Ehlert said Greene killed Durante because she fought back, the Seattle Times reported.

Sam Durante said he and his wife, who rented a duplex during the trial, will return to Seattle and plan to address the court when Greene is sentenced next month.