by Ann Rule
It was not so much a case of Tackley’s being a truly likely suspect in the death of all five women, it was more that the detectives had so little to go on. “We have not been able to develop enough evidence to develop a suspect,” Major Dick Kraske said. “Consequently this [Tackley] is the focal point of our investigation.”
However, Kraske came up with the first short profile of whom they might be looking for. He figured that the killer probably lived in either the south part of King County or in the Pierce County area, and he was apparently quite familiar with the Green River. He had picked a convenient turnout off Frager Road to dump the last three bodies, a spot most people wouldn’t be aware of.
But so many possible victims in a month? They knew they weren’t looking for an ordinary killer—if, indeed, there is such a thing. Lieutenant Greg Boyle commented that “This guy is more than just a ‘john.’ ”
Would he go back to the Green River with more victims? If he did, it would be a pretty stupid choice. The whole area of Frager Road was being monitored by police, although they didn’t publicize that.
THE so-called Green River Killer would soon prove he wasn’t stupid. He apparently abandoned the river as the means to rid himself of his victims. On September 25, a trail biker was zipping around the empty streets of the ghost town left behind by the Port Authority’s buyout when he became aware of a cloying, sickening odor. Seeking the source, he honed in on some overgrown bushes. There, he discovered a female body, in an advanced state of decomposition, half-hidden in the brush of an abandoned yard. She was nude except for what appeared to be a pair of men’s socks that were tightly cinched around her neck.
The man backed away, sick to his stomach. It had been a warm September. No one would be able to identify the dead woman visually.
The acres of overgrown yards, trees, and cement front porches extended both north and south of the airport. Except for passengers in the planes coming in for a landing, few people were even aware it was there. The body’s location was more than three blocks from the nearest street and it was six miles from the Green River, but it wasn’t very far from where Giselle Lovvorn had last been seen—maybe two or three miles.
Now, there were six. This female body, who apparently was Caucasian, would only be absolutely identifiable using dental chart comparisons, although detectives suspected that she was Giselle. Jak-Bak had described a small bird tattoo on her right breast when he reported her missing, and despite postmortem changes, the bird tattoo was still visible in the same place.
The task force, accompanied by German shepherd search dogs, moved through the acres of isolated land, looking for more bodies or some physical evidence connected to the blond girl who had lain there for more than a month. They could see that this would be an opportune spot for a killer. Planes landing to the north at SeaTac were almost close enough to reach up and touch, and their engines screeched as they prepared to touch down. The screams of a hapless woman, crying out for help, would be swallowed up by airplane noise. And, certainly, nobody was going to drive by; the roads had long since been barricaded blocks away. A killer wasn’t likely to be caught unawares as he dumped a body. Dirt-bike riders would signal their approach with the buzz of their loud motors.
Dental records confirmed that the petite blond victim was, indeed, Giselle Lovvorn. Her “best friend” Jak-Bak continued to talk to the press, explaining that he had taken a lie detector test and passed. He had his own opinion of who had killed Giselle. “The word I got on the street was that it was a pimp named Peaches who put the grab on her and was trying to break her spirit and work her out of a hotel or something.”
Reporters’ interest in Jak-Bak waned as his information grew more and more grandiose. And so did the task force’s. He seemed like nothing so much as a con man coming across like a sanctimonious hero. In general, pimps lied to police, anyway.
Why? Why? Why? Whoever was killing the girls from the highway, there had to be a reason. Some motive that drove the faceless killer. Two days after Giselle’s body was discovered, Pat Ferguson, who spoke for the Green River Task Force, admitted that none of them knew why. He said the detectives had speculated on many theories. Maybe the killer was a sexual psychopath, killing for the sake of killing. Maybe he was some kind of fanatic trying to rid the highway of prostitutes. Maybe it was a pimp war with the men who lived off women protecting their territory. They were even considering that it had something to do with narcotics traffic, or that somehow the girls were murdered to cover up another kind of crime.
6
SEPTEMBER NIGHTS began to turn chilly, and Mary Bridget Meehan was still missing. Ray, the boyfriend with whom she had been staying, and her family were very worried, more so because she was heavily pregnant. It didn’t make any sense that she would suddenly decide to leave; she never had. She had spent all of her eighteen years in King County, Washington, in touch with her family even when she wasn’t living at home.
Mary Bridget was the youngest child of four, adopted, as was her brother Timothy, shortly after her birth on May 16, 1964, by an Irish Catholic couple who lived in Bellevue, Washington. Patricia and John Meehan had two birth children, but they wanted a larger family and found Mary Bridget and Tim through the Catholic Charities Organization.
That Mary Bridget should one day vanish from a seedy section of highway twenty miles from Bellevue was almost unbelievable. Bellevue wasn’t a place where terrible things happened, especially not to children of families who loved them so much.
After World War II, the building boom in Bellevue metamorphosed hundreds of acres of farmland and blueberry bogs into neighborhoods with ramblers and split-level homes. Many midwestern families were drawn to the Seattle area by the plethora of jobs available at the Boeing Airplane Company. Lake Hills was first, and then Robinswood, Robinsglen, Spiritwood, and every possible combination of rustic-sounding names for subdivisions that popped up like dandelions. The commute to Seattle seemed a long way then, but few new houses sat empty for long.
It didn’t seem to matter if they were Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic; most families had four children in the fifties and sixties. The Meehans had a girl, Maeve,* first, and then Dennis two years later. Tim and Mary Bridget fit into their family perfectly with Tim a year younger than Dennis, and Mary Bridget two years behind Tim. Her family recalled that she liked to be called Mary, while friends she met later said she hated the name and insisted upon being called Bridget.
“Mary was her street name,” Dennis said sadly. “She liked to call herself that when she was little.”
The Meehans lived in a small house near the center of old Bellevue, the little town it had been before the building boom. The couple were very strong Catholics and saw to it that each of their children was baptized and went through the First Communion rituals. All four children attended Sacred Heart School through grade school, and then began going to public school in the seventh grade. They went to Ashwood and Chinook for junior high and then Bellevue High School.
The elder Meehans were highly educated and intelligent people. Her mother was in her midforties when Mary Bridget was adopted and her father was around fifty. John Meehan was a chemist who worked in the dairy industry, but later he started his own business with a former fraternity brother. They were responsible for developing the powder used to manufacture epinephrine, a very important lifesaving drug that is routinely used to jolt a heart into sinus rhythm in extreme cardiac distress cases, the “epi” that ER doctors call for.
Meehan sold his business in 1975 and soon his financial fortune plummeted. He worked in Alaska in quality control for a year, and later drove a van for Metro, Seattle’s transit service.
Patricia Meehan was a bookkeeper before her marriage, working for the U.S. Foreign Service in Mexico and for the Great Northern Railroad. After she was married, she often did bookkeeping work on a temporary basis for doctors’ offices. They were—except for John Meehan’s remarkable achievements in chemical research—an average Bellevue family. They w
eren’t rich, but they had enough to raise their children and send them to private school.
Mary Bridget was a sparkling little girl with shiny dark hair. As a toddler she was “standoffish” with men, but she came to adore John Meehan. Her childhood was happy and sheltered. She loved animals but she couldn’t have any pets beyond fish because she and other family members had allergies. She railed at this.
“She would bring home stray cats all the time,” her brother Dennis remembered. “And hide them in her room. And sure enough, we’d start sneezing and coughing. We’d find them, and my mom would say, ‘You can’t keep them—see how everyone is sneezing?’ And Mary would say, ‘But I want them! I want them!’ ”
In an attempt to find a middle ground, the Meehans got Mary a parrot. “It didn’t really work,” Dennis said. “She still went out and brought more cats home.”
Mary Bridget had a great big smile and a sometimes fiendish sense of humor. She was talkative and outgoing and when she began to tease her brothers or her older sister, “She wouldn’t back off.” Her humor wasn’t mean, but she could be relentless, as many youngest children are.
Mary Bridget suffered from a hearing misperception that made some subjects in school difficult for her. When she was around ten, her grades dropped. But she was a very talented artist. More than twenty years later, her drawings still turn up unexpectedly in the Meehans’ house in Bellevue. Her “Christmas Mouse” sketch will one day soon be printed on holiday cards her siblings create and send. As different from her mother as most daughters claim to be, they were both artistic and interested in crafts, and probably would have found more in common as the years went by.
On the other hand, she and her brother Tim were often “partners in crime,” getting into things, breaking rules. Mary Bridget and her five-years-older sister were very different. Maeve almost always did the right thing, while Mary Bridget would balk and question why she had to obey.
It was when she hit puberty that her rebellious side made her question her parents’ rules and beliefs. She “discovered boys,” her mother recalled, “in junior high.”
She began to play hooky. Her parents would drive her to school and watch her go through the front door. What they didn’t see was Mary Bridget walking down the hall and out the back entrance. They found out later, from her report card, that she was often absent and close to failing a number of classes. Still, it was hard to be angry with her.
“She was always outgoing, and very dramatic,” her brother Dennis said. “She could work a room and get your attention. She could be very loud.”
Mary Bridget couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen when she met Jerry,* a guy even his friends called “a rat.” Bridget—she was Bridget now—was entranced with him, and her parents’ disapproval only made him more attractive. His father was a highly respected community leader, but Jerry hadn’t followed his example.
Bridget’s world revolved around Jerry, and her grades dropped even more dramatically because studying didn’t seem important if it meant she couldn’t be with him. The Meehans set a curfew for Bridget so she would be home at a reasonable time and study. It didn’t work. Bridget either didn’t come home on time or she snuck out of her window late at night to meet Jerry.
Hoping that tough love would make her realize that she was risking her education and her future over a boy who was nowhere near good enough for her, Bridget’s parents gave her an ultimatum. If she didn’t obey the family rules, she would have to leave. And they stuck to this decision. At fifteen, she found the door locked one night when she came home late.
Bridget acted as if she didn’t care, but she was shocked to learn that she couldn’t go home again. She loved her family, but she was stubborn, too. She had virtually no street smarts. She got frostbitten toes when she tried to sleep outside.
Soon, she moved in with Jerry, who was initially glad to have her there. But twice Bridget became pregnant, and that wasn’t anything Jerry had planned on.
Bridget Meehan wouldn’t even consider an abortion. She was a devout Catholic and she wanted the baby. She miscarried the first pregnancy spontaneously. She wasn’t sixteen yet when she conceived again. Bridget told Jerry that she would never kill this baby, and he kicked her out of his apartment. She either couldn’t or wouldn’t go home to her parents, who were shocked and saddened by her behavior.
Instead, Bridget moved from one friend’s house to another, but she miscarried her second baby, too. The loss of the babies was so traumatic for her that she could never really talk about it beyond saying that she had lost a baby. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d miscarried two. She felt that she had failed.
But Bridget Meehan had such an appealing personality and she usually fought down the sadness that gripped her. There were a number of young men who wanted to date her. She didn’t trust them. She had lost her center, and she had trouble believing in anyone. Still, she needed someone to talk to, someone who would listen to her and help her figure out where her life had teetered and slid down into an abyss.
One of the young men who loved her from a distance was named Andy. He lived with his mother in Enetai, one of the more desirable addresses in Bellevue. She agreed to let Bridget live with them in her house in the spring of either 1979 or 1980, but Bridget wasn’t intimate with Andy. She was too bruised emotionally. Andy accepted her terms; he was happy just to have her around. His best friend Dave was a constant visitor, and he, too, found Bridget a wonderful, if fragile, girl. She had a presence that drew people to her, a kind of glow and appreciation for life, even while she insisted that she had already accepted failure.
“The first time I met Bridget,” Dave recalled, “she came up real close to me and studied my face. Finally she announced, ‘You’re Irish.’ And I was, but I’d never thought much about it before.”
It was Dave who fell so totally in love with Bridget that he would have trouble talking about her more than two decades later, still angry that she had been put into a position where someone could hurt her, and frustrated that he could not save her. In an era where so many teenagers were lost and doing drugs, a lot of Bellevue parents were trying to rescue them. If their own children would not listen to them, they often reached out to other teens. It was commonplace for parents whose own teenagers railed against them to give shelter to kids from other families. They were all buying time, hoping that maturity would bring reconciliation.
Dave already had a girlfriend, and his mother had taken her in. After he met Bridget, he moved out of his own home to avoid a confrontation with either his girlfriend or his mother. He simply wanted to be with Bridget Meehan. “I became voluntarily homeless to spend more time with her,” he recalled. “I guess she really liked me, too, but she had been out of her house for some time when I met her and was already a little bit crazy from it.”
It was 1980, and Bridget still lived at Andy’s house, and Andy and Dave were best friends, and they both loved her. There could have been open hostility, but there wasn’t. She wasn’t interested in sex and she was particularly afraid that she might become pregnant again.
Mostly, Dave and Bridget boasted to each other that they could deal with their own demons if they just explored them enough. Bridget told him that she had never suffered from any physical or sexual abuse in her home, but she claimed to have felt emotionally lost because her parents had been cold and distant with her for as long as she could remember. In her version, she was suddenly asked to move out and her parents had refused to let her ask questions or to give her another chance.
Dave had been abused at home, but he found Bridget’s story “the saddest I’d ever heard.”
As dramatic as many teenage girls can be, Bridget outdid them. She was being very dramatic then. In truth, she was not as estranged from her family as she told Dave. She called home every week or so. Her parents loved her devotedly. If she had agreed to the house rules, she was welcome to come home. But, with Dave, and with Andy, Bridget insisted she could not go home
again.
“We talked forever,” Dave remembered. “She really needed someone to talk to and I was in love with her, but there was reserve and distance on my part because she was so darn unstable and she theoretically knew I had a longer-term relationship still pending. I wanted to help her get her life together, which, in retrospect, seems ridiculous because I was a total mess myself.
“All of us smoked pot and took LSD occasionally,” Dave recalled of the spring and summer he spent with Bridget. “But Bridget and I used to take it and spend hours in hideous self-dissections, examining our inner workings, our worst fears, our problems. I suppose it was narcissistic…but we thought we spared ourselves nothing and sort of reveled in seeing ourselves in the worst possible light. We thought we were being honest.”
The marijuana made their hazy dreams for the future seem possible. They drifted through the spring and summer on the fantasy that they would move to Arizona with Andy in September, when he started college there, even though they knew that wasn’t going to happen. They had no money to travel, and Andy’s grade point average was too low to get into college.
“Andy’s parents finally laid it out for him only a few days before he was due to go to Arizona,” Dave said. “He ended up going to mechanics’ school and then joining the navy. The last I heard of him, he was married and living in California.”
Bridget filled a lot of her days by going to a group in Bellevue called Youth Eastside Services—or Y.E.S., set up to help homeless teenagers. Dave thought it was pointless to go there. There wasn’t anything to do but hang out all day and play backgammon. When the sun went down, savvy teens knew they could score drugs at another group allegedly meant to help street kids. Dave found the “counselors” there creepy and didn’t feel they were a positive influence on Bridget.
