The Blue Binder with Cloyd Steiger
What does a city remember—and what does it try to forget?
This episode of Power of Place takes you into the field—and the files—alongside retired detective Cloyd Steiger, who led hundreds of investigations with Seattle’s Homicide Unit and later tackled cold cases across the Pacific Northwest. With a clarity that comes at a cost, Cloyd speaks through the emotional armor homicide detectives develop. “You have to have feelings before you can have them hurt,” he warns.
On the table between us rests a two-inch-thick blue binder, weathered with time—each page an incident report from a murder case that shaped his career and the streets that won’t leave him.
Some of these stories shook the city.
Cloyd takes us to the scene of the Café Racer massacre, where a gunman shot up a coffee shop near Ravenna Park and left five dead. He walks us through Capitol Hill. First stop: the “Better Off Undead” afterparty, where a costumed guest murdered partygoers dressed like zombies—and first responders couldn’t tell the real blood from the fake. Then there’s the Pike-Pine Hookup Jihad, a nightclub rendezvous that triggered a cross-country killing spree—with Cloyd off to New Jersey in hot pursuit.
Others never made headlines but haunt just as deeply.
A woman bound with her own shoelaces, discarded near Airport Way, identified by a beer can stuck in a tree. A hillside corpse above Woodland Park Playfield, its time of death revealed by insects. The evidence in these cases reads like folklore—but it’s all too real. Like the Chinatown palm reader who seduced an elderly North Seattle coin collector into a deadly long con that ended in blood, knives cast into Ballard’s Ship Canal.
Some moments border on the surreal.
A man beaten to death in a Batman costume, discovered in a downtown construction pit one early morning. The trail leads to killers obsessed with the Insane Clown Posse.
Deeper in Cloyd's binder, we find stories steeped in history.
He reopens the case of Gary Gene Grant, a teenage serial killer who dragged children into the wooded suburbs near Renton back when JP Patches still played on local televisions—an era when kids roamed freely but monsters looked like neighbors. His investigation restores names and dignity to victims long forgotten.
West of the city on the Olympic Peninsula, he revisits the “Lady of the Lake”—a woman’s hand broke the surface of Lake Crescent in the 1930s, her body later identified by a dentist from North Dakota who remembered her not by face, but because she never paid her bill.
And then there’s Kurt Cobain. While Steiger didn’t walk the scene at Denny Blaine, he pored over the evidence—the photos, the ballistics, the autopsy. In a city still awash in speculation, he offers something rare: a clear-eyed reading of what happened and why it still matters.
As we move through the city’s murder scenes with Cloyd, the Pacific Northwest reveals its distinction through the lens of homicide. “You get quantity. We get quality,” he tells New Jersey detectives passing through town. East Coast cities may be marked by routine gangland slayings—but here in Seattle? “You get all the weird ones,” they admit.
For Cloyd, these aren’t just cases. They’re landmarks—mapped in memory, etched into neighborhoods, and never truly closed. But the stories he shares leave a mark on us, too. The case files in the blue binder are more than records of what happened—they’re coordinates that carry weight, tracing back to moments that still matter.
Time moves forward, but for detectives like Cloyd—and those who listen—some places never fully reset.
We record on the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples. Special thanks to Lori & Detective Timothy Devore.
The views expressed in this podcast series are those of the guests and reflect their personal lived experiences. Power of Place presents oral histories with real people, and while some opinions may be controversial, they are shared as authentic expressions that honor the complexity of place. Conversations are edited for length and clarity, but otherwise remain unedited to preserve context and substance. Listener discretion is advised.
“It’s better to know what happened and to know that somebody is being held responsible. But it’s not closure. A mother’s never going to get over the murder of her child—if that child’s three, or fifty-three—she’s never going to get over it. And worse still is a child who just disappears. You never know what happened to them. You never recover a body. In murder cases, there’s no such thing as closure. ”
