Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  CHERYL LEE WIMS, eighteen, vanished on May 23 from the central district in Seattle. It was the night before her birthday. She was a softly pretty girl with a shy look about her. Should she be on the list? Or was she too far away from the Strip? She had had some problems with drug use, according to her mother, Ruth Wims, a nurse, but she could not picture Cheryl involved in prostitution, even though she had become somewhat secretive. The worst problem her mother ever had with Cheryl was that she was missing too much school.

  The only job her family knew about was as a busgirl in a downtown restaurant. There, her boss described Cheryl to detectives as “quiet, conservative, and conscientious.” Her name and Martina’s were added to the Green River Killer’s agenda.

  Yvonne Antosh had come all the way from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Pac HiWay Strip. She was nineteen, a most attractive young woman with very thick auburn hair that fell like scalloped curtains around her face. And she, too, disappeared from the highway. Someone recognized her on May 30, as she stood near S. 141st, but they never saw her after that.

  There were so many of them that it seemed almost impossible that they hadn’t been seen with whoever was taking them away. The girls on the street were edgy, looking twice into cars at men who leaned forward to ask them if they were “dating.” They tried to look out for each other, too. They went off alone, but their friends attempted to remember the cars or something about the johns they left with.

  A number of the suspected victims seemed to disappear in bunches, several of them within a very short time period from the same spots on the highway. It was almost as if he were a fisherman who discovered a well-stocked location and returned again and again until he had “fished” that part of the lake dry.

  Now, in 1983, his favorite trolling areas were along the Pac HiWay, with emphasis on the cross streets of S. 144th, S. 188th, and S. 216th.

  CONSTANCE ELIZABETH NAON, twenty, drove a fifteen-year-old Chevrolet Camaro that she often parked at the Red Lion at 188th when she was working the street. She was a lovely young woman with perfectly symmetrical features, and she did pretty well financially, but she had a drug problem that ate away at her money. She also had a straight job at a sausage factory, and on June 8, she planned to pick up her paycheck there. She called her boyfriend to say she was on her way to visit him and would be there in twenty minutes. She never arrived.

  Police found her Camaro in the Red Lion lot late in June. It was dusty and cluttered with Connie’s possessions, but there was nothing in it that could tell them where she was or what might have happened to her.

  FOR A LONG TIME, it was difficult for her family and friends to know just when Carrie Ann Rois, sixteen, dropped out of sight. Carrie, who looked like the prettiest cheerleader in any high school, probably vanished in mid-July 1983. Originally, a close friend thought she’d gone missing in March, but, later, task force detective Mike Hatch talked to enough people to realize that Carrie had been seen on Memorial Day weekend, and for perhaps a month after that.

  How could a family lose track of a daughter who was so young? It was hard for her mother, Judy DeLeone, to keep up with Carrie, even though she tried her best to rein in her emotionally fragile and headstrong daughter. They seemed to have everything working against them. Judy married twice after she was divorced from Carrie’s father and their family seemed always to be in a state of flux.

  Carrie was in the ninth grade in Nelson Middle School in Renton in November 1981 when Judy married for the third time. A few months later, in the spring of 1982, Carrie told social workers that her stepfather had molested her. She remained in the home until the second time she reported he was sexually abusing her. Carrie went to live with her natural father, but they didn’t get along either. Carrie claimed that he’d hit her and left bumps on her head. She ran away and ended up at the Youth Service Center. When her father was notified, he said, “Send her home,” but Carrie wouldn’t go. She ran away again, walking out the front door of the detention center.

  Carrie always had a lot of friends, and she usually had a girlfriend buddy who ran away with her, and other friends who gave them a room to live in for a while. At one point, Carrie and her fellow runaway lived in the laundry room of somebody’s house.

  Judy DeLeone would never live with Carrie again, but she worried about her constantly. She left the husband Carrie had reported for abuse, but her daughter still refused to come home. And then, on Christmas Eve, 1982, Carrie called her mother from a pay phone to tell her she missed her. Judy picked her up and they shared a wonderful Christmas Eve together, talking and catching up. Still, Carrie didn’t want to move back home. Carrie had a court-appointed guardian and Judy couldn’t force her to come home. Trying to keep their tenuous connection alive, Judy agreed to drive her to the house where she was staying with a girlfriend.

  From time to time, Carrie was placed in group homes and she always got along well. One social worker recalled that Carrie idolized Brooke Shields, whom she felt she resembled, and wanted to be a model herself one day. But she was a jackrabbit, a runner who was always game for a walk on the wild side. And she was also a paradox. While she was attending Garfield High School in Seattle in the spring of 1983, she played the flute and wore her uniform proudly in the marching band. Her grandfather, Ken Rois, bought her the flute, hoping her interest in music would settle her down.

  It did, for a while, but then somebody stole the flute from her school locker. Carrie loved parties and had experimented with marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol. Her best friend, and runaway buddy, Margaret, was placed in the Echo Glen juvenile facility, and when she was released, she found that Carrie was hanging out at a lot of places that could be dangerous, including “My Place,” a topless tavern on the Strip. She had new friends, many of whom Margaret didn’t know.

  Margaret was convinced that Carrie had disappeared on March 24, 1983. “The last time I saw her,” she told Mike Hatch, “Carrie was standing near the Safeway store on Rainier and Genessee Street. She was wearing blue jeans and a tan coat with high brown boots. She had on pink or purple nail polish.”

  But Carrie was still going to high school at that point, and records show she skipped school only a couple of times a week. She was a striking girl, five feet eight, with green eyes, and such exquisite features that anyone who saw her remembered her.

  Neither her mother nor her father knew where she was, but there was every reason to believe she was alive in March, April, May, June, and at least some part of July in 1983. But she was working the streets, using the unlikely pseudonym of “Silver Champagne.” She usually wore “a ton of makeup,” according to a university student she dated for a while. “I told her she was so beautiful that she didn’t need makeup,” he said, “but she just laughed.”

  Task force detectives learned that Carrie and her new friend Lisa had been frequenting the Strip along the two block area of S. 142nd to S. 144th in the late spring of 1983. She had had many friends who kept track of her. Several of them recalled hearing her talk about a peculiar experience with a “trick.” Although she didn’t mention the man by name, she said he had taken her far away from the Strip, driving her up almost to the summit of Snoqualmie Pass, an area that was fifty miles from the airport, to “see the snow.” Spring blizzards are not at all unusual in the high elevations of the pass, as drivers who head up to ski or to drive to eastern Washington know.

  Carrie had come back from her unusual jaunt. Her friends had seen her get out of a pickup truck safely, albeit a little intoxicated. All they remembered about the driver was that he was a white male who wore a baseball cap. Carrie said that he was “kind of weird,” but she didn’t elaborate. They thought it was very strange for her to have agreed to go on such a long trip with a john.

  What they recalled about the truck was that it was brown and tan, or brown and white, with a camper on it. It wasn’t a new truck, but no one who saw Carrie get out of it could give the make or the year accurately.

  And then, sometime in June or Ju
ly of 1983, Carrie Rois simply vanished. Her grandfather moved back from Honolulu to help look for her. Judy DeLeone was plunged into guilt and remorse and terrible worry. She had always believed that one day Carrie was going to come home, older and wiser, and not so anxious to run away. But the months ground on and there was no word at all from her daughter.

  Christmas Eve, 1983, came and Judy sat by the phone, hoping against hope that Carrie would come out of hiding and call as she had the year before. But the phone was silent.

  At least one other teenager had disappeared from the airport strip in midsummer 1983, although her ties to home had stretched so thin that no one reported her missing. Her name was Tammy Liles and she was sixteen years old in June 1983.

  I HAD LIVED in Des Moines since 1963, and the corner of Pac HiWay and S. 216th was as familiar to me as our main street was. There were many reasons to patronize the shopping area at the highway intersection. The Safeway was up on the southwest corner of the highway, along with Bartell’s drugstore, a popular Seattle family’s chain. There was a hot-tub store run by a family with kids in my kids’ classes, and I bought one for the backyard of the first house I’d ever purchased on my own. I’d almost signed an earnest money agreement on a house a block away from the 216th intersection until I found out the whole area was about to be taken over by the Port Authority and the houses torn down. Most people in Des Moines went to Furney’s nursery with its acres of roses, trees, rhododendrons, and bedding plants, and so did I, pulling one of their red wagons around to fill with plants. That was close to the northwest corner.

  Locals didn’t know that the Three Bears Motel was a hot bed motel; it looked cozy from the outside. So did the New West Motel, which was next door to a long-term care facility. In the early eighties, this section of the old highway wasn’t considered sleazy. My family had eaten dinner at the Blockhouse Restaurant a few blocks south to celebrate birthdays, holidays, graduations, and sometimes after somber funerals and memorial services.

  Even though I was a true-crime writer, I didn’t think of this section of Pac HiWay as part of the Strip; the dangerous part was supposed to be several miles north, near the airport. Ironically, S. 216th was the intersection where I always felt safe after I’d driven up the dark, winding road from the Kent Valley floor and the Green River.

  But I was misinformed. I had no idea how many of the missing girls lay dead within a few blocks of that intersection. Nor did anyone else.

  ROSE JOHNSON* was, arguably, one of the more beautiful of the dozens of girls who vanished during the Green River Killer’s peak killing swath from 1982 to 1984. In many ways, her life before she landed on the streets was similar to her sacrificed sisters; in some ways it was far worse.

  Rose grew up in the south end, dropped out of school before graduating, and was allegedly the target of incest by several male members of her family. Her mother, a woman of strong opinions who was angry at life, angry at her, and angry at her own circumstances, blamed her daughter for the breakup of her marriage. Rather than taking Rose’s side when she came to her and said her father was molesting her, her mother saw her, instead, as a rival. She accused the teenager of deliberately trying to seduce him, and sided with her husband.

  Enraged, he made life hell for his daughter. She had no privacy; he took her bedroom door off the hinges. She had to dress in her closet or behind a blanket. She never knew when someone would come in. When her window was broken in the coldest part of the winter, her father refused to fix it, and she was freezing, despite the cardboard she wedged into the empty frame. He padlocked the cupboards and the refrigerator so she couldn’t find anything to eat at home. It was up to Rose to survive any way she could.

  The only thing she had to sell was herself. She bought an old beater of a car with some of the first money she made; if she couldn’t make enough to pay for a motel room, she had the car to sleep in. It wasn’t that bad in the summer months.

  Rose was afraid of her mother, more because of the venom she seemed to exude than for any physical punishment the older woman administered. Even when her father finally moved out, Rose didn’t go home. It was still dangerous for her there.

  “The first time I met Rose’s mom,” one of her close friends recalled, “it was in the Fred Meyer store in Burien. She walked up behind Rose real quietly, and she scared her. They had a few words that weren’t very nice. When the woman walked away, I asked Rose who in the world that woman was. She said it was her mom. I couldn’t believe it. She was so mean to Rose. I could see that Rose didn’t mean anything to her.”

  Rose sometimes parked her car in the lot at the Red Lion Motel at 188th and Pac HiWay, but more often she left it in a little weed-filled lot next to Don the Barber’s at 142nd and the highway. Don recognized her because she was there often. As he cut hair, his window looked directly over to the lot, and he saw Rose meet johns there dozens of times. She would lock her car and leave with different men, and then come back later. Don recalled that he noticed her because she was very pretty and very young, and unlike most of the girls who strolled the Strip, he never saw her with a male protector.

  “I don’t know how long she’d been parking there,” Don said, “but one day, she just wasn’t there. Or the next. Or any day. She never came back. When I saw her picture in the paper later, I realized why she wasn’t there any longer. She was dead. He got her, too.”

  What Don did not know was something that would shock him more than Rose’s disappearance. The man who killed her had sat in his barber chair regularly for decades, chatting amiably and laughing at Don’s jokes.

  Like many of the Green River Killer’s victims, Rose sniffed cocaine when she could afford it. It blurred the harsh edges of her life and gave her a false sense that things were looking up. Early on the day she vanished, she had called a friend and arranged to buy some cocaine.

  “When she never showed up, I didn’t think too much about it,” her friend said. “ ’Cause that’s how people like that are. But a few days later a friend of ours called and asked me if I’d seen Rose, and I told her I’d talked to her just a few days earlier. We spread the word and tried to find her, but none of us ever saw her again.”

  Her family didn’t report her missing for a long time. When they did, they were vociferous about their anger with the task force.

  14

  THE BOY GREW OLDER but he was still behind in school and in social interaction. His parents had moved yet again—from Idaho to Seattle—and he had to start all over trying to make friends. He was about thirteen now and he still wet the bed most nights. His mother was out of patience. Now that he was on the verge of puberty, he was both angered and sexually excited when she washed urine from his genitals. She had so much control over him. She was tougher in her way than his father was. She kind of bossed his father around, too, and she was the one who got things done. He and his brothers called her “the warden.”

  She went off to her job dressed for success, wearing nice clothes and jewelry and with her face made up perfectly. She was very popular and competent in her job. When he was smaller, back in Idaho, she had been kind to him, and they worked on puzzles together. Even though she was gone all day working in their father’s gas station, he sort of remembered that she had come home to cook. It didn’t matter; they weren’t hungry, and they had plenty of things to do. And she had tried to help him with reading. “I had a really hard time reading.”

  But his mother wanted things really clean and scrubbed away at his genitals after he wet the bed. Once aware that hands touching his penis felt good, he thought about sex quite a bit. It wasn’t a subject that was mentioned or explained in his home and so he didn’t ask questions about whether what he felt was normal or not. From something his mother had said, he did know that masturbation was one of the worst sins of all. Worse than raping someone.

  Two girls about his age lived right next door to their Seattle house. They had a pool and he was able to watch them surreptitiously as they splashed around in their bathing
suits. They didn’t know he was watching, so he was often invited over to join them.

  He became a window-peeper, or, rather, he tried to see through blinds. He had a crush on one of the neighbor girls, whom he termed “an older lady,” although she was really only seventeen. He hung out with her younger brothers and was at her house a couple of times a week, watching television.

  By this time, he often got erections, and he almost always did when he was in her living room. That summer, she watched the TV set from an easy chair, but he sat on the floor and managed to slyly pull aside his shorts so that she could see his erect penis if she happened to glance his way. He thought she’d be impressed and want to have sex with him, but she never gave any sign she’d seen him.

  Although she didn’t appear to notice that he was exposing himself, he fantasized about talking to her and asking her to have sex with him. He was fourteen, but he was still in the sixth grade, taller than almost everyone else in his class because he’d been held back.

  He once looked into her bedroom window at night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her in her underwear, or maybe even with no clothes on at all. He found she had pulled down all the shades. He rapped softly on the window, thinking she might come out and join him, or maybe even ask him into her bed. But, suddenly, the lights went on and he heard the front door of her house open and the sound of heavy footsteps. Her father raced around the house and almost caught him. He managed to run home just in time.

  Once, while he was alone with a younger girl cousin, he enticed her into the woods by giving her a nickel. There, he put his hand up her skirt and touched her between her legs. But she tattled and he was punished.

  Sex occupied his thoughts, but he had no outlet. He became a frotteur, cleverly brushing himself against girls, or so he thought. His hands would drift across girls’ and women’s breasts as if accidentally. Sometimes, they stared hard at him as if they knew what he was up to. He had to be careful not to touch the same girls too many times and make them suspicious.