by Ann Rule
“I’ve tried so many times to find my sisters,” she said. “But the Medina Children’s Home told me they’d had a fire and their records burned. I looked through the old newspapers, too, but I never found anything.”
Sue Draper became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl, Mary Sue, when she was only fifteen. “Oh, I made my share of mistakes, too,” she admitted. “My folks made me marry Mary Sue’s father. It was 1957 and women didn’t raise babies when they were single then.”
The Drapers had always been kind to Sue and they stood by her, even though they had insisted that she marry her boyfriend, who was nineteen. The marriage didn’t last; her husband went off to prison before Mary Sue was six months old.
“He wasn’t a very good robber,” Sue recalled. “He tried to hold up a Savings and Loan, thinking it was a bank. And then he broke into a cash register and got only a screwdriver and a penny. He tried to open the safe with the screwdriver.”
Sue and baby Mary moved in with her parents. And the deceptions began again. Mary Bello grew up believing her grandparents were her parents and that Sue was her older sister. It was the same situation in which Ted Bundy grew up—a subterfuge that backfired for both Mary Bello and Ted Bundy, leaving them full of distrust and rebellion. For that matter, Sue had been in the same boat herself.
Mary Bello found her baby book when she was ten—the same age her mother had been when she discovered her true parentage. But she was more aggressive and demanding than Sue had been. “She wanted to know why we hadn’t told her the truth,” Sue recalled. “I didn’t know what to tell her. She didn’t understand how rough it was for me to try to raise a baby alone when I was only fifteen. But Mary was never the same after she found out the truth.”
When Mary was about twelve, Sue bought a little house across the street from her parents, hoping to make a home for her daughter. But it was too late. Mary wouldn’t mind anyone. She ran away repeatedly, quickly got into drugs, and learned that she could make older men do things for her because she was pretty. Mary Bello wasn’t thirteen yet when she was committed to Grand Mound, the Washington State Training School for adolescent girls.
“That was about the only education she ever had, even though she was very intelligent,” Sue remembered. “By the time she got home two years later, she was lost to us. She would come home off and on, and then she’d get mad and leave. If she was mad at me, she could go to my folks’ house. My mom would baby Mary and let her get away with things, just like she did when Mary was a baby. For many years, Mary never faced up to anything. She would go from me to my mom’s, to her friends, and then back again to me. She always had someplace to go when she got angry at whoever she was staying with.”
Mary Bello was emancipated when she was fifteen years old. She wasn’t really employable in a straight job. She worked for a while at a Burger King, but lost her job because her friends kept coming in and causing a commotion. She was a lovely girl with pale skin, and dark eyes and hair. She was five feet seven and willowy, and she found it easier to use her looks to make money than to work at minimum wage jobs that were meant for kids.
When she was nineteen, Mary followed her mother to Arizona, stayed for a little while, and then went on to Texas by herself. She worked as an exotic dancer in Tucson and got a discreet tattoo; it was a tiny lobster etched low on one buttock. Her favorite record to dance to was “Summer Nights” by Glen Campbell.
Although she seemed satisfied with her life, Mary had always wondered what her real father was like. She’d met him only briefly once when she was about sixteen. At that time, he’d told her he had “found religion.” He was preaching on street corners and collecting money “for the poor.” Sue found out he kept the money for himself, to buy liquor. She tried to keep that information away from Mary, feeling that it would be better if she didn’t know her father was a con man.
At nineteen, Mary was still determined to know her father. Reluctantly, Sue Villamin told her where to find him in Arizona, but she went along and parked nearby because she didn’t know what he would do.
“He tried to rape her,” Sue said. “He locked her in his place and wouldn’t let her out. I had this big German shepherd with me and I pounded on the door until her father finally let her go. But Mary had to accept that she really didn’t have a father. Never did have.”
Remembering her only child, Sue’s eyes misted. “Mary went through so much pain. She was waiting in a man’s car once when he went into a fish restaurant to get a take-out dinner. But he’d really gone in to rob the place. She didn’t know he was going to do that, but she was arrested for robbery, too, and she was convicted and had to serve time at the women’s prison in Purdy. She said it wasn’t too bad; she got to stay in these separate little ‘apartments’ up on the hill.”
Headstrong and willful, teenage Mary Bello blamed her mother for the bad things in her life, and she grew addicted to drugs—heroin and cocaine—turning to prostitution to pay for her habit. She took chances all the time, sure that she had a protective shield around her. Even though Sue Villamin couldn’t understand why Mary chose the life she had, they began to grow closer when Mary was in her early twenties. They were friends now, and that made sense because they were only fifteen years apart in age.
Mary was a rebel but she was kindness personified. She would help anyone in need, often giving her last dollar to beggars on the street. And she had a wild sense of humor. “I’d get so mad at her,” her mother said, “and then she had this funny little smile. I couldn’t stay mad.”
Mary was a good cook, and she loved holidays, never missing Thanksgiving or Christmas with her family. On the last Christmas of her life, she showed up with her arms full of presents, none of them wrapped. In 1982, she had “overbought” for everyone, but she looked delighted as her mother and grandparents enjoyed their gifts.
Mary Bello was afraid to trust men enough to love one, although she may have loved a man named “Jimmy.” He wasn’t a pimp, and he cared for her. Following the pattern she’d set all of her life, she would live with him for a while and then move out. But, in her twenties, she always came back to him.
Sue Villamin begged Mary to stop prostituting herself, and Mary looked at her as if she were speaking another language. “She’d been robbed and beaten by johns, and she still wouldn’t quit,” Sue remembered. “She wanted me to know what her life was like. And I didn’t want to hear. It seemed like the more I shut my ears, the more she told me. She said she didn’t like it, but it supported her habit, and it gave her a certain kind of ‘power’ over men. I don’t know, maybe because of the way her father treated her.”
Sue pleaded with her to find another way to live.
“No,” Mary replied. “This is the way I have to make my money.”
They talked quite a bit about the Green River Killer and Mary pooh-poohed her mother’s concern. “Don’t worry about it. I can avoid him. Mother, he’ll never get me—I’ll be all right. I don’t want to hear about him!”
And then she laughed because it was so ridiculous for anyone to be concerned about her.
One thing her mother never knew was that Mary was very aware of the threat the so-called Green River Killer posed—not so much for herself, but for the vulnerable kids who had just come to the Strip. On September 12, 1983, her concern had led her to call a detective she knew on the task force with a tip.
“Look,” she said, “I want you to know that I had a date with a really weird john. I’m okay, but he has a lot of knives in his car and at his house, too.”
The guy was older, and he drove a recent model blue sedan. She didn’t know the make of the car or the license plate number, but she recalled that his house was at 218th and Military Road. Mary Bello’s report was checked, and it became part of the huge permanent file on the unsolved Green River cases.
Finally, Mary and her mother reached a kind of détente. Mary lived in one or another of the motels on the Pac HiWay, and Sue lived in a mobile home about ten miles south on
the same highway. All that summer of 1983, Mary was trying hard to overcome her heroin habit, which necessitated her going to Tacoma—a fifteen-mile trip—every day to get methadone to ease her withdrawal symptoms.
“She would take the bus down to my trailer,” Sue said. “And I would drive her on down to Tacoma, wait for her, and bring her back to my trailer, and she’d catch the bus again.”
Sue had a fleeting feeling of doom on that beautiful October day, like a tattered gray curtain brushing by the yellow maple leaves. She watched Mary’s back as she walked away from her trailer toward the bus stop.
“I love you!” Sue called out.
“Mary looked back and she smiled at me. That was the last time I ever saw her. I think I knew it was, too, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.”
MARY BELLO always called home every two days, no matter where she was. Now, her birthday passed, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Her grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and they all hoped she would call. They needed her. “She’s just gone off someplace,” her grandmother said. She had always avoided letting harsh truths surface. “She’ll show up. You watch, she’ll show up.”
It would be a long time before any of them knew where Mary was. Sue Villamin kept a quote close to her that helped her deal with losing Mary: “Times Change; Love Doesn’t.” She also had a thought of her own that others might heed: “The punishment for prostitution should not be death.”
But she didn’t know if Mary was dead or alive.
21
THE CRIME SCENE searches multiplied in the fall of 1983. The over-burdened and underfunded Green River Task Force not only had new disappearances to investigate, but the detectives were retrieving the pathetic remains that had begun to surface. Each body site had to be carefully raked and sifted, the tiniest speck of what might be evidence preserved and labeled: fibers, hairs, rocks, paint chips, twigs, loose finger- and toenails, bits of bone, rotted pieces of cloth, fragments of cheap jewelry, tiny slips of paper, a cigarette, photos and moulages of tire tracks, a condom. The detectives badly wanted to find something that would turn out to be absolute physical evidence that they could link to the man they’d looked for for the last fifteen months.
Young women who had been on the verge of life months or a year before had been reduced to scattered bones, many with missing limbs. Except for Carol Christensen, none of them was fully clothed, and the question about whether Carol even was a Green River victim remained unanswered. Her body site had obviously been staged, while the latest bodies found appeared to have been merely thrown away. If their killer was so careless with his victims, detectives still hoped he might have been slipshod about leaving something of himself behind.
They might not have had the physical evidence they needed, but there was a definite pattern to what some news reports were crassly calling “dump sites,” an unfortunate way to describe where human beings had been left.
If the SeaTac Strip between S. 144th and S. 288th was to be seen as the center of a giant circle, it had quickly become obvious that the Green River Killer was leaving several of his victims together in three general areas, north and south and east. He couldn’t go very far west without coming to the shores of Puget Sound. But he could expand almost exponentially in the other three directions.
The south and north end of the Port Authority’s property (SeaTac Airport) had aspects that would have tempted someone who wanted to hide what he had done: empty houses and foundations, overgrown weeds and shrubbery, long stretches of deserted fields, and, always, the high-pitched roar of jet planes overhead. And, of course, all of this acreage was barely more than a stone’s throw from the Pac HiWay Strip.
Whoever he was, the Green River Killer seemed to have operated on the “cluster” theory—leaving more than one dead girl in each location. Sometimes there were two together. Sometimes three. And, in some areas, there would eventually be six or seven, although that was a grim possibility that no one working on the case could yet even imagine.
Maybe he had some crazy sense that his victims shouldn’t be alone, and so he’d left them with “friends.” Not likely. Someone who could kill so many teenagers and young women wouldn’t care about that; his plan to dispose of the bodies of his victims had to be a convenience for himself or an obscure symbol that meant something to him. And pragmatically, he would have needed to be rid of them as soon as possible so he wouldn’t be caught with a body in his vehicle, or his house or hotel room. That was only common sense.
HE DISPOSED of the dead girls, but he kept replacing them. Pammy “Annette” Avent, who sometimes worked The Camp in Portland, was back in Seattle on October 26, but apparently not for long. Later, her friends realized they’d last seen her in the Rainier Valley area.
ON OCTOBER 28, Patricia Anne Osborn, nineteen, was in the other end of Seattle, almost at the city limits on Aurora Avenue North. The “trick stops” on Aurora were the intersections of the 1100 block, the 8500 block, and the 10500 block. Patricia had been arrested three times for prostitution in 1983, and she was walking along Aurora when she was last seen. Her parents lived in Oregon and didn’t realize that she was gone. When she didn’t contact them over the holidays, they reported her missing. But she had really been missing for three months.
Pammy was black and Patricia was white—the Green River Killer seemed to have no racial preference. Instead, he chose the most vulnerable—and the prettiest—of the girls who risked their lives every time they got into a car with a stranger.
If all of the women were his victims, it seemed that the GRK was driving up and down the I-5 Freeway, slipping off on exit ramps the whole length of the city. It also looked as if he was picking up his pace. For serial killers addicted to murder, it takes more and more murders for them to maintain the modicum of normalcy they show to the outside world.
IT WAS SUNDAY, October 30, 1983. At about three that afternoon, Delise Louise Plager, twenty-two, was expected at the home of a good woman friend. A mutual male acquaintance, who had allowed her to keep a few of her belongings in his storage unit, waited on their friend’s front porch. Delise wanted to retrieve some items, including a Halloween costume she had promised to bring home for her friend’s child. She was supposed to be taking the bus to the house near 15th Avenue and Columbian Way, an area slightly northwest of the Rainier Valley section of Seattle.
Delise, who had been called “Missy” since she was a little girl, was living temporarily with a friend. She had two children of her own, but she was having a rough time supporting them. She had had a rough time for as far back as she could remember. She had blue eyes and blond hair and a perfectly proportioned face, faintly sprinkled with freckles, but her eyes looked as if they had seen it all and found it bitterly disappointing.
Given the circumstances of her life, that wasn’t surprising. Missy Plager was bitter and as fragile as a butterfly, and yet her last day on earth was spent trying to make a child happy. Life is rarely fair, and for some especially vulnerable children, life is one sad experience after another. For Missy, about the only thing life gave her was a pretty name and a few people who really cared for her, even though they weren’t able to protect her for as long as they had hoped they could. By the time her life got really rocky, she had many names. Sometimes she was “Misty,” and sometimes she was “Roxanne Dunlap” or “Carrie Bailey.” Her real birth name was completely different from any of those. Her parents had named her Lisa Veronica. Some said her true last name was Sansisan.
Before Missy and her twin brother, Jon, were five, their birth mother was found to be unfit. The reasons were cloudy but it’s probable that her excessive drinking was the deciding factor. Missy was born “dead,” but the attending nurse was able to resuscitate her. The babies went home to a tenuous situation. Their birth father left when they were about six months old, and their mother already had a little girl a few years older, the result of an earlier liaison with another man. Missy’s parents, Dennis and Patricia, were divorced later that yea
r—in 1960.
Missy and Jon were removed from their first family, and taken to the Catholic Children’s Organization facility. Missy was an appealing child and she was soon adopted, but her new parents found her difficult to deal with. Perhaps because of her failure to breathe at birth, she was hyperactive and needed patience and special medications.
In reality, Missy may have suffered the most from grief and separation. She had lost the twin brother she loved. They had bonded together before birth, but were placed separately for adoption. She was formally adopted in July 1968. Through the years ahead, she kept looking for Jon, but the family who adopted him wanted to cut all cords to the past, and Missy was not allowed to see him or contact him. They had always been together, the only comfort either of them had. Missy remembered her brother vividly, and she worried about him. A kind social worker found where he had been placed, and although she couldn’t tell Missy where he was, she was able to tell the little girl that she had seen him and spoken to him, and he was doing okay.
Tragically, Missy would not find him again for many, many years, and she cried inconsolably for her lost brother. She was a very pretty little blond child, and her adoptive parents, who lived on a ranch, hadn’t expected the personality problems that soon became apparent. They had older sons and their experience with parenting had been normal and fairly serene, but Missy was excitable and too loud and nervous, and she had a great deal of trouble concentrating.
In desperation, when Missy was ten or eleven, her adoptive parents placed her in the Antonian School for Special Children in Cheney in eastern Washington. It was a Catholic institution whose director was Sister M. Antonia Stare, O.P. The nun’s family owned the land where the school stood.
