by Ann Rule
The concept of a serial murderer—someone who killed similar victims one after another after another—had bloomed years before in the thought processes of one of the greatest homicide detectives of them all: Pierce Brooks. Confident that he was on to something way back in the fifties, Brooks did his research by visiting libraries when he was off duty, looking through old newspaper files for multiple-murder cases all across America. I remember his telling me, “Ann, there weren’t any computers for cops then. It would have taken all of L.A.P.D. headquarters just to hold one of those first computers.”
Once captain of the Homicide Unit in the Los Angeles Police Department, and later police chief in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, Brooks wondered if criminologists had failed to recognize this kind of killer, for which he coined the term serial killer.
In March of 1983, Brooks would be responsible for a gathering of eagles among the top ranks of law enforcement to consider the problem of killers whose victim tolls rose into the double digits. He enlisted special agents in the Behavioral Science Unit (B.S.U.) of the F.B.I. and the U.S. Justice Department, along with top cops from cities, counties, and states all over America to confer at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Most of the B.S.U. special agents agreed with Brooks’s theory that there was a unique and terrifying kind of killer roving just beneath the level of our awareness across the United States.
But this was August 1982, and the first five victims found in the Green River were still deemed to be the prey of a “mass murderer.” They were not. They had, almost certainly, been killed by a serial killer, and within months, that would be understood.
The arena of forensic science has expanded again and again since 1982, and as Dick Kraske’s task force began to pencil in a rough list of young female murder victims who might be connected, they suspected that they were dealing with a force of evil far greater than the general public realized. It didn’t matter that only five young women had been found in the river, all the subsequent victims would be attributed ever after to “The Green River Killer.”
IT WAS APRIL 1982, when Theresa Kline, twenty-seven, was last seen alive in Windy’s Pub at Aurora Avenue N. and 103rd. She was a very pretty woman with long auburn hair, and people remembered her. She had planned to visit her boyfriend, a professional gambler, who was playing poker in a cardroom several blocks away. Theresa asked her friends in Windy’s if any of them were heading north after closing hours, but they all shook their heads. She smiled and said she would catch a bus or hitchhike if she had to. It was 12:35 AM when she left the tavern. Five minutes later, one of her girlfriends walked outside, headed for a nearby gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. Theresa was gone.
Less than three hours after that, Theresa’s body was found in an alley eleven blocks away. She had been manually strangled.
Theresa was a divorcée with one son and her ex-husband had custody, although she visited her little boy often. She had been very happy the night she was murdered, and she was definitely headed to meet her boyfriend. She wasn’t selling sex, even though Aurora Avenue was the north end Strip. Theresa wanted very much to have her son back with her, but she knew she couldn’t do that until she had a job, and she had started a new job the night before. Things were suddenly looking up for her.
So far, Theresa’s murder was unsolved.
Patricia Jo Crossman, fifteen, was a chronic runaway who had been arrested three times for prostitution. On June 13, she was found dead of stab wounds in the Garden Villa Apartments on S. 204th Street near the city limits of Des Moines. These apartments were near what was considered the southern tip of the SeaTac Strip.
Angelita Bell Axelson, twenty-five, had not been seen since sometime in the spring of 1982. No one kept very close track of her, and witnesses could remember only that she’d been with an unidentified man in a downtown Seattle transient hotel. Her body, badly decomposed, was found on June 18. She, too, had been strangled.
Unsolved cases involving young women were not peculiar to Seattle and King County. Snohomish County detectives, who worked in the county just north of King County, had their share, and so did Pierce County to the south. In fact, Snohomish County had a case somewhat similar to the Green River cases. It dated back to February 1982. Oneida Peterson, twenty-four, had last been seen as she waited for a bus to Marysville, Washington. Her strangled body was found on February 8, off the rural Sultan Basin Road. She had never been involved in prostitution.
Some of the women killed in early 1982 went on the Green River Killer victim list, and some did not. It was impossible to know if all the crimes were attributable to a single killer. Their ages and manner of death were alike, but their lifestyles differed. Ominously, the list grew longer. The entries may or may not have been correct. Some experts felt the range was too wide; others thought it wasn’t inclusive enough.
In March 1982, several girls who made their living on the streets reported a weirdo to the Seattle Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. A man had threatened them, using his Doberman as a weapon. He told them that he would command “Duke” to bite them if they didn’t get into his 1967 Mustang. Those who obeyed him were raped, and then subjected to a bizarre lecture. The rapist warned them that they were going to hell if they didn’t change their ways.
Those reports sounded as if a kinky-sadistic-religious psycho was out there preying on any woman he could find alone and either force or entice into his vehicle.
It was too early in a killing spree to look at the total number of murdered women throughout 1982 and see them as unknown and interchangeable entities who could very well be Green River victims. Many of the photos that accompanied the news coverage of the girls who were dead or missing were mug shots from prostitution arrests. There could have been many different killers. The victims all looked tired and sad and a little defiant, but more resolved to the life they were caught in. Some of their faces were tearstained, and they all looked years older than they really were. Those mug shots instantly separated them from the college girls and young women who lived in dorms or nice apartments in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods—Bundy’s classic victims of eight years earlier.
The five victims whose bodies had floated in the heedless Green River were lumped together because of where they had been found, but they weren’t really that much like one another, even though it was easy to infer that they had all met the same killing machine of a man.
Amina Agisheff, thirty-seven, was one of the first names on the extended Green River list even though she didn’t fit into any of the predictable categories. She was twice as old as many of the dead girls, she was not a prostitute, she didn’t hitchhike, she was a Russian immigrant, and she had a stable loving family, a loving boyfriend, and young children. She was a hard worker who couldn’t afford a car.
On July 7, 1982, Amina left her mother’s apartment after a visit and was waiting for a bus on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. And she simply vanished, leaving her family to agonize over where she might be. When her picture appeared in the news alongside other presumed Green River victims, Amina always looked out of place. Perhaps she was added to the grim roster because she disappeared a week before Wendy Coffield’s body was found.
5
FOR THE GREEN RIVER Task Force, it was akin to playing a game with no rules. There may have been many victims already, or was it possible that there were only five? There was no telling how many suspects they were looking for. With victims whose lives were peripatetic, moving from city to city or from one motel or apartment after another, it was difficult to know if they were truly missing. Many women on the streets lost touch with their families, who were spread out across America. In such cases, they might not be reported as missing until they hadn’t called home for two Christmases in a row or for Mother’s Day. They might be dead, but no one knew that except their killers.
When college girls vanish, their roommates or housemothers or families have great difficulty waiting the forty-eight hours required to make an adu
lt “Missing” report. When runaways and kids on the street disappear, all too often there is no one to sound the alarm that they are gone.
For the initial Green River Task Force, it seemed more likely that the women found in the river were the only victims, that it was over, and the man who murdered them had either moved on or stopped killing. Now, looking at it with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, the pattern of multiple murder is crystal clear.
But it most definitely was not in the months that passed from August 1982 to November 1983. Validating disappearances and identifying true victims was as difficult as finding beads from a broken necklace, dozens of them rolling on the floor and becoming lost in crevices and under desks and cabinets. Who could ever know how many there had already been, or how many were yet to be found and restrung into a strand that connected them all?
GISELLE LOVVORN was seventeen in the summer of 1982. She had no ties to the Seattle area, but earlier that year her boyfriend had persuaded her to leave California with him. Jake Baker,* known as “Jak-Bak,” was several years older than Giselle. He had street savvy and had pulled enough bunco ploys in California that a move was beneficial—even urgent—for him. He figured he should start over in new territory. He got a job driving a cab on the SeaTac Strip.
Giselle was the youngest child of an upper-middle-class family in the San Fernando Valley, where her father had his own insurance business. She was an unhappy girl who had begun to run away from home when she was only fourteen, and she dropped out of school in the tenth grade. She had been miserable in California, ever since the family moved there from New Orleans a few years earlier. Her father wondered if it was because the district they lived in bused students to inner-city schools. Out of place ethnically, looking so different from her classmates, Giselle had been beaten up and robbed of her lunch money. It seemed impossible for her to make friends or to fit into any group in school, and she was lonely.
Whatever the reason, she refused to go back to school. Her parents certainly weren’t happy to see her with Jak-Bak; he was too old for Giselle, and he wasn’t the kind of man who would encourage their daughter to finish her education. That was a tremendous loss because Giselle was very intelligent; she read constantly and her I.Q. had tested at 145, well above genius level on some tests. She was a voracious reader and her favorite book was Colleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds.
In her perfect longhand, Giselle wrote out McCullough’s description of a songbird who was born to seek out the thorn tree, find the sharpest, longest thorn to impale itself upon—so that it might sing one high perfect note as it died.
Many of Giselle’s thoughts were dark, and she appeared to find themes of death somehow romantic, even though she seemed sunny and upbeat on the surface. Like thousands upon thousands of other fans, she idolized Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead, and was proud to follow their concerts, considering herself a devout “Dead Head.”
Giselle also liked the Charlie Daniels Band, and she collected antique Jack Daniel’s whiskey labels. She wasn’t very different from other young women of the late seventies–early eighties in her wardrobe, wearing long peasant skirts whose hems came undone because they swept the rough ground; tight, long-sleeved cotton shirts, without a bra, of course; and little makeup.
But she was more rebellious than most. Her parents could only hope that she would outgrow the wanderer streak that had taken her around the country with only a backpack to hold all her possessions. Sometimes Jak-Bak went with her, but she often traveled alone, calling him or calling home for money orders when she was broke. She sometimes landed in places like Fargo, North Dakota, or Cut Bank, Montana, or Eugene, Oregon, as she followed the Grateful Dead concerts. Western Union records showed that Giselle was at a truck stop in West Fargo, North Dakota, on June 3, 1982, to pick up a fifty-dollar money order that Jak-Bak had sent her.
Giselle’s family was actually relieved when she traveled to Seattle for what they believed would be the final time before she turned her life around. She assured them that she was only going to pick up some possessions that Jak-Bak was holding for her, and then she was coming home to settle down and go back to school.
But within a week she changed her mind and decided to stay in Seattle. Jak-Bak was a master at persuasion, and he had evidently sweet-talked her into staying with him.
Giselle was a small girl whose thick blond hair tumbled down her back. She had freckles and looked wholesome and young, but she was soon working the SeaTac Strip. Her appearance appealed to certain males cruising the Strip—the ones who liked the “schoolgirl look.”
Giselle was strolling along the highway in mid-1982, looking for tricks. Jak-Bak knew it and didn’t stop her even though he later told detectives and reporters that he cared deeply for her and had done his best to talk her out of prostitution. He insisted that their living arrangement was merely platonic.
More likely, theirs was a typical relationship between an opportunistic man and a girl who didn’t seem to question that if the man who was “protecting” her really loved her, he wouldn’t allow her to sell herself to complete strangers. By the time most girls figured that out, it wasn’t easy to break the ties.
But Giselle had some happy times in Seattle. On July 13, she got to see a Charlie Daniels concert. Four days later, Giselle left their apartment at one in the afternoon. It was a Saturday, and, according to Jak-Bak, she planned to turn three or four tricks. He said he’d asked her not to go but she’d been adamant about her plans.
If she had read local papers that week, she would have seen the coverage about the bodies in the Green River, and the murders were all over the news on television, too. But Giselle wasn’t familiar with Seattle, and she really knew only the area around the airport. She probably didn’t even know where the Green River was.
Afternoon became evening and Giselle didn’t come back to the apartment. Not that night. Not on Sunday. Everything she owned and the only person she really knew in Seattle, everything that mattered to her, was in the little apartment on First Avenue South and S. 180th.
Jak-Bak soon warmed to the glow of media attention and gave many interviews. He recalled that he had tried to report Giselle missing right away, but the police wouldn’t take him seriously. That wasn’t true. They had listened to him, and Giselle had officially gone on their missing persons list on July 17.
Jak-Bak said he’d met Giselle in a Los Angeles–area restaurant a year earlier and they had become best friends. “We weren’t intimate,” he said sadly, “but we were really, really close.” He and Giselle had shared their Seattle apartment with another man. He told reporters that he had continued to look for Giselle on the Strip, at truck stops, motels, and bars, but he never found her. She had left everything behind, even her treasured backpack; all she took with her was her California I.D. card, which falsely listed her age as nineteen, not seventeen.
Jak-Bak said Giselle’s plan was to establish a regular clientele so she could have a career as a call girl and not have to stroll the highway. He had urged her to get a job in a delicatessen or some other straight employment, but she was headstrong and believed that she could take care of herself.
Perhaps. Or perhaps she was following a plan he had outlined for her.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a “blind” story that quoted King County lieutenant Greg Boyle as saying the task force was investigating the possible disappearance of two more young women who fit the “profile” of the Green River victims. One was Giselle Lovvorn, although her name was not mentioned. The other was Mary Bridget Meehan, eighteen. Her boyfriend, Ray, reported that he had last seen her on September 15 as she left the Western Six Motel just off the Strip. He said she had planned to walk to the Lewis and Clark Theater that day. It was a two-mile walk, a long way for a girl who was eight months pregnant. Bridget and Ray hadn’t come to the Strip from very far away; they’d both lived in Bellevue, just across the floating bridge from Seattle, all their lives.
“Was she wo
rking?” detectives asked Ray.
He shook his head, seemingly confused. “I don’t know.”
KING COUNTY detectives had now talked to almost three hundred people as they looked for connections between the first five victims and witnesses who might have seen or heard anything unusual. They had made a request of the Behavioral Science Unit of the F.B.I., asking for as thorough a profile as they could come up with on the man, or men, they were looking for.
The task force knew now that Wendy Lee Coffield and Opal Mills had attended the same continuation school in Renton, but there was no indication that they had known each other or been seen together at the end of their lives. And Debra Bonner and Cynthia Hinds had patronized the same bar in Tacoma. It was probable that they had been at least acquainted, although no one at the bar could remember ever seeing them come in together. It was an intricate pattern that the investigators would find again and again; people whose lives revolved around the Strip often knew each other, if only tangentially.
As for the two missing girls, they might come home again. Or they might be dead.
The first Green River suspect to merit headlines was Debra Bonner’s lover/pimp, Max Tackley. By August 21, the thirty-one-year-old former University of Washington student was being held for questioning while three detectives searched his small house in Tacoma. Tackley had given his permission for the search, and Detective Bob LaMoria, Detective Dave Reichert’s partner, remarked, “We either have to prove him innocent or prove him guilty.”
