Federal Way Flashback: The fast life and high times of Dick Balch

When Dick Balch began his Chevrolet and Fiat dealership on Pacific Highway South in Federal Way in 1969, the Puget Sound economy was at the beginning of a downward spiral. The region’s recession, fueled by massive layoffs at Boeing, was an inauspicious time to start a business, and Balch initially struggled. However by 1971, though the Boeing recession was still ongoing, Balch had managed a huge increase in sales.

The increase in sales was linked to his launching a series of commercials. Some aspects of these commercials varied, but they commonly showed him personally assaulting individual vehicles on his lot with a sledgehammer while laughing in a high-pitched manner. He commonly asked his viewers, “If you can’t trust your car dealer, who can you trust?”

Balch became a local celebrity and attracted national attention, including an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and profiles in TV Guide and Time magazine. He emceed an annual event, the Easter Egg Scramble at Seattle Center. He offered himself as a mentor to local youth on the various problems facing them. Profits rose continually at his business. The future seemed limitless.

A very dark cloud came over Balch’s horizon in the late 1970s as he was at the center of a kidnapping, rape and robbery case. The episode began during a four-and-a-half-hour stretch of the afternoon on April 21, 1978. During that period of time, four women, aged 16-31, who were employed to clean the house, were held hostage at Balch’s Redondo home by a masked man armed with a submachine gun. They were chained to pipes in Balch’s sauna, and one of them was raped. The raped woman was ordered to phone Balch, who was then at his car dealership. Balch was instructed to order his assistant to open a safe at a trailer he owned across the street from his business and retrieve from therein an envelope containing several hundred dollars in cash and a dildo in which was hidden $50 worth of cocaine. Balch arrived home at the tail end of the ordeal with the requested items. The gunman was masked, but Balch claimed he soon recognized the perpetrator’s voice as that of Michael Ward Hale, a former house guest at the residence. Hale was soon placed under arrest and indicted.

Hale, who had previously served time for a drug offense, denied the charges and claimed Balch had framed him. Besides calling witnesses who claimed that Hale was in Seattle and not Redondo at the time the crimes took place, his defense team focused its strategy on attacking the credibility of Balch, who had been the only person to identify Hale as the perpetrator.

The trial revealed that Balch sometimes used cocaine recreationally and enjoyed sharing pleasures of the flesh with young women. Pam Becker, who had once been married to Balch for nine days, testifying on Hale’s behalf, claimed that Balch used young women (“Dick’s groupies” she called them) as mules for a drug trafficking enterprise. Despite this attack on Balch’s reputation, Hale was convicted and imprisoned.

Balch gave a comprehensive interview regarding claims made about him during the trial to Seattle Times columnist Eric Lacitis in July 1978. As to his lust for women, Balch, then aged 47, fully allowed that “I’ve always liked young girls, no question about that, probably 18, 19 years old… you go out with somebody older, they don’t want to have fun.”

His luxurious Redondo home was fitted with a video recording system that he said “could videotape anything,” including “your relations with a woman, if she agrees to it.” At that time he was in a relationship with a 22-year-old woman named Lisa, whom he eventually married – spending $20,000 to $30,000 on the wedding reception – and produced a son. The relationship was over by 1980.

As for Becker’s charges, Balch claimed that he earned $67,000 in income the previous month alone; thus there was no economic incentive for him to be a drug dealer. He claimed that the Drug Enforcement Agency and IRS had investigated him extensively in 1974 for supposed drug dealing. A grand jury, he said, had cleared him.

He claimed that the DEA had been drawn to him because of phone calls that Hale had made from Balch’s home while a house guest as part of Hale’s drug trafficking operation of which he, Balch, had been completely unaware. As to why he hid the cocaine in a dildo, Balch replied “Well, where else would I put it? A dildo is as logical as anyplace. It was just sitting there so I put it in there.”

Mauled by a nationwide economic downturn, Dick Balch’s car dealership went bankrupt in 1980 and his 60 employees laid off. In January 1981 his Redondo home went up for auction. Members of the public were able to enter his home and gawk at its contents, including a large brass bed (once showcased in Decorator Magazine) and an enlarged framed newspaper story with the headline, “Nights of Love Prolong life, Says Doctor.”

Since his bankruptcy, Balch rarely re-entered the public eye. From what small evidence is available it appears he abandoned his previous hedonistic lifestyle and has been tranquilly married for many years to a woman named Melissa, whom he first encountered at one of his Redondo house parties in the late 1970s.