by Ann Rule
Except for the people who had known and loved her, and the Kent Police Department, Wendy Coffield’s murder didn’t make much of a blip on the awareness of people who lived in King County, Washington. Locals in the south end were afraid that summer of 1982, but not because of Wendy Coffield’s murder; they were frightened because two people in Auburn had died suddenly and agonizingly the month before of cyanide poisoning after taking Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules purchased in Kent and Auburn stores. Investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were sweeping thousands of pill bottles off store shelves for testing. A lead investigator warned against taking any capsules until all the seized painkillers had been tested.
It was a scary time, but, sadly, not because of one teenager whose defiant nature and habit of hitchhiking had probably ended her life. Various police departments in the greater Puget Sound area had unsolved murders and missing persons cases involving young women, but there didn’t seem to be any pattern among them.
In the next few weeks, the Green River rolled on, and fishermen sometimes talked about the body found in the river, but teenagers didn’t swim in the Green River, anyway, and few of them had even known Wendy Coffield. The river’s current was too swift for swimmers, and Lake Fenwick was close by. It was dangerous, too, because there were no lifeguards on duty, but it was still a popular spot for keggers.
AND THEN THE EARTH SHIFTED and more stones bounced quietly down a mountain of catastrophe. It was another Thursday, August 12, 1982, four weeks after Wendy’s body was found, when what had appeared to be an isolated tragedy began to take on a horrific pattern. Another woman’s body floated in the Green River about a quarter of a mile south of where Wendy had been discovered. The second body was found by a worker from the nearby PD & J Meat Company. It was difficult to determine where she had gone into the river, but her corpse, unclothed, had been trapped in a net of tree branches and logs. Where her killer had met up with her, no one knew. It was unlikely that she had drowned accidentally.
There was no question that the body had been found inside the boundaries of King County, so the case was assigned to Detective Dave Reichert, who was next up to be lead detective on a homicide. Reichert, a detective for only a few years, was about thirty, although he looked much younger and the investigators he worked with usually called him “Davy.” He was a handsome man with bright blue eyes and an abundance of wavy brown hair. Reichert was a family man with three small children and a strong Christian ethic. Like a lot of King County deputies and detectives, he had grown up in the south end of the county. He was totally familiar with the area, where he and several brothers had roamed as kids.
That summer of 1982 had been devastating for the King County Sheriff’s Major Crime Unit, particularly for Dave Reichert. They had lost one of their own in a senseless shooting. Sergeant Sam Hicks would surely have been working alongside Reichert. They were very close friends, not really “hot dogs,” but imbued with the enthusiasm of youth and the belief that they could track down almost any bad guy they were looking for.
Hicks was a tall, broad-shouldered man, slightly balding, always smiling, whose desk sat in the middle of the Major Crimes office. But on June 17, Hicks and Officer Leo Hursh approached an isolated farmhouse near Black Diamond to question Robert Wayne Hughes, thirty-one, about the murder of a south Seattle rock musician. Bullets zinged at them from somewhere inside a barn as they crouched, unprotected, in the open—they had had no forewarning that Hughes might be dangerous. As Hughes fired at them from his secure position, Sam Hicks was killed and Leo Hursh injured.
Hicks’s funeral procession was many miles long and south-end residents, many of them with their hands over their hearts, lined the route in tribute, tears running down their cheeks. Captain Frank Adamson, Reichert’s commander, saw how Hicks’s death had crushed him and he’d considered reassigning him until the enormity of his grief had passed. But he thought better of it. Reichert was sensitive, but strong, and he was managing to cope. He wasn’t likely to take things into his own hands if he encountered Hicks’s killer.
Only three weeks after Sam Hicks’s funeral, Wendy Coffield’s body was discovered. And now another dead woman. Hicks was gone. One of the best homicide detectives the department had ever had wouldn’t be there to help solve her case. But Reichert, if anything, would work as hard as two men now.
The woman floating in the Green River wasn’t just a case to him—he cared about all human life. He was a high-energy optimist who waded into the water, expecting that he would find out what had happened to her, and that he would quickly ferret out who had done it. Years later, Reichert would recall that the slender hand of the woman in the river seemed to be reaching out to him for help. The only way he could do that was to help convict whoever had killed her.
It was easier to identify this “floater” than it had been in Wendy Coffield’s case; her fingerprints were in police files. Debra Lynn Bonner was twenty-two years old, and she had lately made a precarious living on Pacific Highway South, working as a prostitute. In the thirty days before Debra’s body was found, she had been arrested twice for offering sex for money.
Reichert and Detective Bob LaMoria learned that the last time Debra had been seen alive was on July 25, eighteen days before. She left the Three Bears Motel, located on the corner of Pac HiWay and 216th, telling friends that she hoped to “catch some dates.” But she never returned, and her room was cleaned and rerented. It was only a short drive east from the Three Bears Motel to the Green River, down the winding road past the Earthworks Park.
At most, it was two or three miles to the riverbank. In life, Debra had been a slender, exotic-looking woman. She grew up in Tacoma, along with two younger brothers. Like Wendy, she had dropped out of school—in Debra’s case two years before graduating. With little education, she’d had trouble finding jobs. She had been excited about taking a test to join the navy, but she didn’t pass. Still, she planned to get her GED (high school equivalency certificate) and start a different kind of life.
But Debra fell in love with a man who was only too happy to let her support him. The only way she could do that was to work the streets. At first, her life with him was exciting. Max Tackley* treated her like a queen, he had a newer model Thunderbird and they traveled a lot. They also experimented with heroin. Once in the life, Debra found it hard to get out.
Detectives learned that she had told her friends that she was “freelancing,” working the “circuit” from Portland to Tacoma to Seattle to Yakima and Spokane on the east side of the Cascade Mountains and back again. But Debra had been trying to turn her life around, and she was meticulous about paying $25 a week on a $1,000 fine she owed to the Municipal Court in Tacoma, the seat of Pierce County. Fines were the cost of doing business for girls on the street, but Debra wanted no reminders of her old life. Week by week, she had whittled her debt down to $775 by the summer of 1982. Wherever she was, Debra was faithful about calling home, and her folks always accepted her collect calls. Her dad had an eye operation scheduled for July 20, and she called a few days later to see how he was and to tell him she loved him. That was the last time she phoned.
Debra had sounded cheerful in that call, but she was actually running scared. She had confided in a bartender that she was being stalked by her boyfriend/pimp. All the sweet-talking was over and she said that Tackley claimed she owed him several thousand dollars. “She was crying and upset,” the woman recalled. “She didn’t know how she was going to pay him.”
Debra probably had reason to be afraid. Twelve years earlier, her lover had been convicted of manslaughter (lowered from second-degree murder) in the shooting death of a man he’d known since childhood—and that was over a $25 debt. His sentence was only five years in prison. He’d also been charged with two counts of assault in different confrontations over drug deals gone wrong, and received a ten-year sentence, but one that ran concurrently with his first sentence. He was out in seven years. If Debra really owed him thousands of dollars, it was
likely he would collect it one way or another.
During the seventies, when the approach to rehabilitation was extremely lenient, Tackley was one of the recipients of a scholarship to the University of Washington. A number of parolees benefited from the educational experience, but some of them didn’t change. Tackley’s rages continued unabated and he got into fights. Heretofore, however, he had never been known to hurt women.
King County sergeant Harlan Bollinger acknowledged that they were focusing on Max Tackley, at least for the moment. As far as anyone knew, Debra had no links to Wendy—nothing more than their final resting place. It was even possible that two murders four weeks apart could be grim coincidence.
None of the homicide investigators made the mistake of using tunnel vision. In a week, they talked to almost two hundred people, most of whom worked in the areas where Wendy and Debra spent their days and nights—in Tacoma and along the SeaTac Strip. They questioned motel and hotel workers, taxi drivers, bartenders and cocktail waitresses. They contacted police and sheriff’s detectives in both Portland and Spokane to see if they might have unsolved cases involving young women who worked the circuit. None of them had, making it less likely that a “pimp war” might be under way.
But something was happening. Three days later, there was no question at all that a bleak pattern was emerging. It was a warm Sunday, and a local man was in a rubber raft drifting along the Green River looking for antique bottles or anything else of value that someone might have thrown into the murky waters. Previously, he had found bottles so old that they had “applied lips”—their tops added after the rest came out of a mold, embossed by old-time companies, with the lavender patina created by a century of being left out in the elements. Bottles like that could bring hundreds of dollars apiece.
There were, of course, other things in the river not as desirable: garbage and junked cars and things people were too lazy or too cheap to take to the nearby county dump on Orilla Road. In the summer’s heat, the river was shallower than it would be in winter, but there were still deep holes. Looking for treasure, the rafter found horror instead.
He squinted, trying to see through the hazy water, and drew back suddenly. Two still figures floated beneath the surface, their unseeing eyes staring blindly at the sky. They looked, at first glance, like dolls or store dummies, but he knew they were too detailed and lifelike to be only facsimiles.
The treasure hunter paddled frantically for the bank. There were no cell phones in 1982, so he had to signal passersby and ask them to call the King County Sheriff’s Office.
The officer responding realized at once that the female forms were human, but oddly, something held them close to the river bottom.
Dave Reichert and Patrol Officer Sue Peters responded first to the scene when they were summoned by the sheriff’s dispatchers. Reichert had been at the river when Debra Bonner was found, but Sue Peters had had her own patrol car for only a week. Neither Reichert nor Peters could have imagined then that they were stepping into a nightmare that would grip them for more than two decades, and undoubtedly haunt them for the rest of their lives. Each would remember that warm Sunday with crystalline detail, the way all humans recall a moment that suddenly alters the direction of their lives.
Major Dick Kraske, commander of the Major Crimes Unit for the sheriff’s office, would remember, too. His pager sounded as he stood talking to a neighbor, balancing grocery bags. The Radio Room directed him to the river site. “In a way, I knew it was something big,” Kraske said. “I had the same feeling—some call it your illative sense, where you know something big is happening—when I was a lieutenant and my boss, Nick Mackie, called me out to Issaquah because they’d found Bundy’s victims. He told me to put on a tie and a sport coat and meet him out there. This time I put on my tie and my sport coat and went out to the Green River alone.”
Kraske always thought the Ted Bundy murders would be the worst he’d see in his career, but he was wrong. He got to the riverside a few minutes after Reichert and Peters. Search and Rescue (SAR) was on the way already, and Reichert was photographing the riverbank while Peters was recording what was happening.
Reichert half slid down the bank—it was very steep, at least a seventy-degree angle. The grass and reeds were as tall as the six-foot Reichert, and Peters disappeared completely in it when she followed him down. The grass closed like curtains behind them when they reached the river.
Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the women’s bodies hidden, and he had chosen this spot well. From the road it was almost impossible to see the bodies down in the river. The thick vegetation assured that. Now Reichert and Peters could see that both victims were weighted down by large rocks placed on their breasts and abdomens. The near-boulders were clearly designed to keep them from surfacing, as all bodies eventually do when decomposition gases form and make them buoyant.
Fixated on that, Dave Reichert suddenly slid on the slippery grass, only to look down at something that lay on the edge of the river. He tumbled backward to avoid it. He had almost stepped on yet another female corpse. Either the killer had been too exhausted to carry the third victim all the way into the water, or he had been spooked by someone approaching and dropped his burden.
This girl looked quite young, in her midteens, apparently. She had a paler complexion, although she was severely sunburned, probably after death. She looked to be of mixed racial heritage, and it was obvious she had been strangled by ligature, with her own blue shorts or slacks.
Whoever the killer was, he was almost certainly a very strong man. It would have been no easy feat to carry the three bodies from a vehicle and down the steep bank and its slippery grasses. The river bottom was silt, slick as grease, and yet he had somehow maneuvered the huge rocks into place. It would be even more difficult for investigators to carry the dead women back up, but they would have more manpower.
Deputy Mike Hagan of SAR and the Marine Unit arrived with a strong line. Police diver Bob Pedrin checked the river around the corpses, then maneuvered them closer to the river’s edge.
King County medical examiner Dr. Don Reay had also responded to the scene, as the man detectives called “Doc Reay” always did. Sadly, there was no hurry now, and they waited for him to nod and say that it was all right to move the victims. The onerous task of lifting the dead girls from the Green River and up its bank began. Not only did the investigators, divers, Reay and his deputies have to hoist what was literally deadweight up the precipitous riverbank, they had to preserve as much possible evidence as they could while they did so. Kraske and Reay stood side by side with the others, heaving to keep the rope from slipping. Still, they were all aware that the heedless river had undoubtedly washed away much of what would have helped them the most. If the victims had been raped, semen traces were probably gone now.
As the three bodies were being put into the M.E.’s baskets, Kraske noticed that someone had mixed up the tags that noted the sequential extraction identification. It mattered which girl had come out of the river first—and last. Knowing that a mistake now could cause all further records to be faulty, he ordered a slowdown until the tags were corrected.
He had also called for radio silence while his investigators worked beside the Green River. The one thing they didn’t need was a full bombardment from the media, which always monitored police calls for interesting incidents. He hoped to buy time until the next day when he knew reporters would descend on him like flies.
The two women who had floated beneath the surface of the river itself had ebony skin and were clearly African American. The girl on the bank could be either white or black. Along with Wendy Coffield and Debra Bonner, their names would become indelibly etched in the minds of the investigators, the news media, and anyone who lived in the Northwest. For the moment, however, they had no names. Hopefully, someone had reported them missing; they had been in the river for more than two days.
It wouldn’t be easy to take their fingerprints because of the skin slippage
caused by long immersion in warm water and decomposition. As the body decomposes, hand and finger skin loosens so much that it can be slipped off like a glove. In order to transfer prints, pathologists sometimes have to sever the skin at the wrist, then slip their own hands into the “glove” and press the crinkled tips onto an inked pad.
MARCIA FAYE CHAPMAN was identified first, and it was through her fingerprints. She was thirty-one when she died, an attractive woman with symmetrical features and a lush mouth, so petite that she was known as “Tiny” by her friends. She had lived on the Strip with her three children, aged eleven, nine, and three, and she mainly supported them through prostitution. She had left her apartment on August 1, 1982, and failed to return.
The other woman in the river and the girl on the bank were still unidentified. Police sketches of how they might have looked in life were published in area papers, and the public was asked to respond if anyone recognized them. One was five feet three and a little chubby; the other was five feet five and very thin. The first girl had medium-length hair that had been dyed from black to red; the second had a cluster of short ringlets and a chipped front tooth.
One woman in the river had been completely nude; the other two still wore bras that had been yanked above their breasts and twisted around. They had all been strangled by ligature.
Although the medical examiner’s staff knew that the cause of death in the four latest victims was strangulation—just as in Wendy Coffield’s death—they refused to release that information. High-profile cases that receive a lot of publicity bring out compulsive confessors in droves. The more details police agencies can keep secret, the better their chance to weed out those who get a perverted thrill out of confessing to crimes they never committed. The cause and manner of death are difficult to conceal, but medical examiners and detectives try. It is absolutely essential not to reveal more specific information.
