Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  The case of the tall blond girl whose name was either “Star” or Tina Tomson or Kris Nelson or Kimberly Nelson was assigned to Mullinax and Haney. Paige had described the man in the red pickup as white, in good shape, about five feet ten, wearing a plaid shirt and possibly a baseball cap. Probably around thirty-five years old.

  According to Paige, “Star” had been wearing black, pin-striped slacks, a pink blouse, a long black leather coat, and blue Nike shoes the last time she had seen her. Nothing else was missing from their motel room. Detective Cherisse “Cheri” Luxa took possession of Star/Tina’s things—a few clothes, hair rollers, toothbrush, makeup—and put them into evidence.

  ONLY A SMALL PERCENTAGE of the missing girls’ remains had been found. The killer had somehow managed to hide most of them, a fact that brought horrible images to the minds of the public and the task force detectives. He had left most of the bodies thus far discovered unburied, hastily covered with tree branches or debris. He didn’t appear to care anything about them, just threw them away like broken dolls.

  Still, the task force detectives found that he had gone to the trouble of burying the dead girl someone found on November 13, 1983, in a wooded area only a few hundred yards west of Pac HiWay and about four blocks from the Red Lion. Actually, there were two victims—a young woman whose womb still cradled her almost full-term fetus. The baby had died with her. The pregnant girl lay faceup with her knees slightly bent to the left. She and her baby weren’t buried more than two or three feet deep, but the killer had scooped out enough dirt to cover this victim’s body. What had been different? Was it because this girl had been pregnant and that had made his violence more shameful? Did he, perhaps, have some feeling for his victims?

  This grave had held Mary Bridget Meehan, who had lost her first two babies through miscarriage and been persuaded to give her third up for adoption. Now she had been robbed of giving birth to this infant, or to any baby ever again.

  How many more victims were there? Were they searching for some brilliant maniac who could take on experienced investigators and thumb his nose at them?

  It seemed so.

  22

  SCHOOLWORK never got any easier for him, although he took some satisfaction in his ability to have secrets from all the students who thought they knew everything.

  As much as he fantasized about having sex with various girls and women, he hadn’t had much luck actually accomplishing it. There was a girl who was a couple of years older than he who lived over in Kitsap County. They’d hooked up once and that was the first time he’d actually had sexual intercourse. She was a lot more experienced than he was, and he knew she was a little scornful of his performance.

  “For some reason,” he said later, “we never did it again. I don’t know why. Just didn’t.”

  He wasn’t a reader or good at math, but he was pretty good at fixing things, and his dad taught him about cars, even though, like everything else, it took him a lot longer to learn the steps than it would most people. He liked hiking and fishing and being in the woods. He liked being alone and watching people who didn’t know he was watching them.

  He worked as a busboy at the Hyatt Hotel near the airport in 1965 and 1966, and then he got a job at the Gov-Mart Bazaar, a store that sold mostly bargain items bought from closeouts at other companies. He finally had a few girlfriends in high school, but they wouldn’t have sex with him. Eventually, he did meet a girl who would agree to go steady with him. He bought a hamburger from the fast-food place where she worked, and when he took a bite, he found she’d slipped in a piece of paper with her name and phone number on it. On a date, he attempted to have sex with her at a drive-in movie, but he ejaculated prematurely before he even entered her. After that, they had intercourse regularly.

  HE HAD HAD so much difficulty with reading and academic subjects that getting through school seemed an endless process. He was twenty when he graduated, and he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do in life. He considered joining the service and learning a trade there.

  The war in Vietnam still raged and he stood a good chance of being drafted, so he joined the navy. Before he was sent to his duty station in San Diego, he got married to his steady girlfriend, Heather. They had a “military wedding,” as he described it, at Fort Lawton in Seattle.

  She was a year younger than he was. They were married by a military chaplain in August 1970, and she moved with him to San Diego. They seemed to get along all right for the months he was in training in California, although he was on a ship for several days each week. When he was in port, they had sex a few times a day. Other than that, they didn’t do much that was very exciting, but she seemed happy enough to him.

  And then he shipped out to sea for several months. She was alone in a strange city in a strange state. Neither of them was very mature, and they began to accuse each other of infidelity. Since writing was difficult for him, his letters weren’t particularly tactful.

  Actually, they were both cheating. He didn’t feel that visiting prostitutes when he was away from home should count, as he had a very strong sex drive. He formed fleeting relationships with a half-dozen Filipina prostitutes. She was bored and lonely, and moved in with another young woman—a girl who was married to a marine. And she began to date, too.

  He checked into sick bay because it hurt to pee, and was told that he had a venereal disease. He was very angry about that because he had already had gonorrhea once. Maybe he thought it was like the measles or mumps and he wouldn’t get it again, but he was really steamed this time. Apparently the cautionary films shown by the navy failed to make an impression on him. He had rarely worn condoms, but a long time later he insisted he didn’t blame the Filipina prostitutes. They had always treated him well and introduced him to more exotic sexual practices than the missionary position.

  He had been an angry boy and his rage grew when he became an adult, although he kept a very tight lid on it. He was still drifting and apparently had no insight at all into his own motivations for doing things.

  His bride recalled that when he returned from sea duty, she confessed to him that she had been so lonely that she had dated other men. He would steadfastly deny that he ever knew for sure whether she had been unfaithful and assert that he didn’t question her at all when he was transferred to Washington and she suggested he drive back to Seattle on his own.

  He left his young wife in San Diego. It was a fatal blow to their marriage. He prevailed upon her to come back to Seattle, and she did, but she stayed only a week, telling him “This marriage isn’t working” as she left for the airport.

  Inside, he had never been that sure of himself, and being cuck-olded hit him harder than it would most men. He branded his wife a “whore” and they were divorced less than a year after their marriage.

  He wasn’t soured on marriage, however. He was anxious to meet another woman, one he could trust. He quickly began frequenting places where he could meet women, and he dated three or four of them in rapid succession, although none of his relationships lasted more than a few months.

  And once he had discovered prostitutes, he patronized them, too.

  23

  IT TOOK A WHILE for Jerry Alexander to track down Bridget Meehan’s old boyfriend Ray. The Port of Seattle detective was still assigned to her case since her body was found within his department’s jurisdiction. Ray was pretty foggy at first about his life with Bridget, but his memory grew clearer with every contact. Finally, he admitted that Bridget had been working the Strip. Asked if he remembered any particular johns, he recalled her talking about one who drove a blue sports car with a vanity plate.

  Alexander ran the vanity plates through the Department of Motor Vehicles in Olympia and got a hit on the second one that seemed right. It was for a blue Karmann Ghia whose registered owner lived within two miles of the Strip.

  The man was in his thirties and seemed normal enough, almost meek in demeanor. He admitted readily that he occasionally paid for sex, and that h
e’d been with Bridget. “I’m attracted to girls with big breasts, and I saw her walking her dog near Larry’s,” he said. “She had a lonely look about her.”

  He didn’t seem a likely suspect; his answers were forthright, and the task force detectives had questioned hundreds of men who had either been turned in by tipsters or arrested by undercover officers posing as “prostitutes.” Many of them seemed far more sinister than this guy.

  Alexander ran the man through records and got somewhat shocking results. He had a record as a mental case. Another detective had contacted him on a report totally unconnected to the Green River murders. “He’s 219-5/16th,” the other officer said. (In Washington State, mental cases are referred to as “220s” because police officers back in the very early days received a bonus of $2.20 for arresting such potentially dangerous subjects.) “He thinks he’s a spy, he’s suicidal, and sometimes he carries a nine millimeter.”

  But he probably hadn’t killed Bridget Meehan; he had a solid alibi for the time period when she disappeared.

  AS 1983 DREW TO A CLOSE, Sheriff Vern Thomas pleaded with King County politicos for funding that would allow the investigation to be expanded, and while some listened with concern, at least one voiced his doubt that the county’s image would be much improved by spending taxpayers’ money on investigating the murders of “hookers.”

  It was an appalling comment, but it reflected the opinions of some citizens. It was an odd November. While some people were angry at the girls who were forced to work the streets even though they were frightened, there was another contingent accusing the task force of failing to care about the victims just because they were prostitutes.

  The solid citizens marched, carrying signs that said “Clean up our community!” and “No more prostitution!” Little League moms walked beside their uniformed sons, and mothers pushed their babies in strollers with balloons tied to them. They carried signs in their parade that demanded action. One woman said she was terrified that the Green River Killer might start abducting “nice” girls and killing them.

  Seventy-five people crowded into the South Central School District boardroom and demanded that the sheriff’s office do more about keeping prostitution away from their children.

  “We’ll never stop prostitution,” the businessman who had organized the meeting announced, “but get them out of our community!” The self-righteous businessman backed down only a little, allowing that probably the dead girls were somebody’s daughters and their parents must be grieving.

  Lieutenant Dan Nolan, a seasoned and dedicated investigator, who had been working the Green River cases for months, suggested a whole new concept to many of those outraged citizens. Perhaps they might exert a little pressure on the johns, rather than condemning the girls they paid to have sex with.

  To the people who had gathered there, it seemed a very backward way of approaching the problem. They nodded as someone said that everybody knew that it was the prostitutes themselves who were the cause of the problem. Scarlet women with no respect for themselves. Trollops. Promiscuous women who chose the lazy way to make a living. They had seen hookers in movies and knew what they were really like.

  And they were so wrong. Offering sex for money is not a profession that glorifies women; it is a profession born of desperation, poverty, alienation, and loneliness. But one of the men who had sponsored the citizens’ protest dismissed prostitutes easily, saying, “They do it because they really like sex.”

  To the detectives who had virtually abandoned their own families in their desperate search for the killer, the criticism coming their way was like pouring salt into an open wound. On the more positive side, a reward was suggested for information leading to the arrest of the Green River Killer. It began with a $500 donation, and by November 25, 1983, grew to $7,600.

  It was easy to pick apart what the investigators had done—or had not done—in some critics’ eyes. Experts were brought in to look at the Green River probe thus far and recommendations were made. Dick Kraske, Dave Reichert, Fae Brooks, and Randy Mullinax tried to take the evaluations with an open mind, but it was difficult for them. Unless someone had been in the trenches of a ghastly series of homicide cases, how could they know what it was like?

  Some of the advisers who were asked to look at the way the cases had been handled did know, because they had been there. Bob Keppel, once a King County detective, had been a lead detective on the Bundy case and was now assigned to the Criminal Division of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. In his new position, Keppel had taken a second look at a number of cases that had stalled in the cumbersome wheels of justice and brought some of them to trial with resulting convictions. He was also visualizing a computer program called HITS that would “collect, collate, and analyze the salient characteristics of all murders and predatory sexual offenses in Washington.”

  Keppel had used an almost “stone age” computer to try to winnow down all the suspects turned in during the search for “Ted.” Bob Keppel was a very intelligent and organized investigator who was making a name for himself with his emphasis on cross-referencing reports, suspects, dates, times, places. Even though computers were not really a large part of homicide probes in the early 1980s, they were not unknown, and Keppel was ahead of the game in that department. He would stay with the Green River Task Force far longer than he expected to.

  Despite a temporary lull, both Keppel and Dave Reichert believed the homicides were still going on. They were the yin and yang of the task force, with Reichert’s tendency to seek action and Keppel’s analytical approach. Occasionally, they would frustrate and even anger each other, but they were both dedicated to tracking down the same quarry, so they worked it out. If there was one thing Bob Keppel had learned, it was that no detective should become overly possessive of his case to the detriment of the real goal. And no department should get involved in a “turf war” over a high-profile investigation.

  F.B.I. special agent John Douglas, whose forte was profiling, flew into Seattle in late 1983 to take a close-up look at what was happening in King County. Douglas, for reasons entirely separate from the Green River cases, would be lucky to leave this investigation alive.

  In early December, he collapsed in his hotel room with tachy-cardia and a fever nearing 106 degrees. His brain was seizing and he was near death when fellow F.B.I. agents checked his room because they hadn’t heard from him. John Douglas was diagnosed with viral encephalitis and would not be able to work on the Green River cases, or any others, for six months. As it was, his recovery from paralysis and threatened brain damage was remarkable. In the years since, Douglas has been involved in any number of high-profile cases, including the JonBenet Ramsey murder, and has gone on to write several best-selling books.

  Before he became ill, however, Douglas had suggested a technique that might be successful if the task force should ever be sitting across a table from a viable suspect. To allay feelings of deep embarrassment and shame and to elicit admissions that were ugly and shocking, Douglas said the questioners could separate the person in front of them into two categories: “the good Sam” and “the bad Sam.” That would allow him to disconnect from what the “bad Sam” had done.

  It was a great idea—if they ever got that close. But as Christmas, 1983, approached, morale was down in the Green River Task Force. The few detectives working the cases complained of the same things the “Ted” Task Force had hated: sitting in a stuffy, cramped office; sorting though mountains of paper, tips, and notes; trying to find the common denominators that might lead them to a suspect they could interrogate.

  The detectives who tracked the wraithlike killer had worked overtime for more than a year, but received virtually no support from the public because they hadn’t arrested anyone and seen the case through to a satisfactory trial and a conviction.

  Dick Kraske was transferred from the Criminal Investigation Division in late 1983, trading jobs with Terry Allman who had been commanding the North Precinct. Frank Adamson woul
d be taking over the Green River Task Force.

  Kraske had had a lot of bucks stop at his desk in the Bundy investigation, and it had continued during the Green River murder cases. In many ways, Kraske had the toughest job in the toughest serial murder case in America. “The first year of the investigation was anything but the model for interagency and interdepartment cooperation,” he recalled. “A lot of it could be attributed to the anxiety surrounding the leadership and what the commitment would be to the investigation. One of the many problems with the Bundy case had been the ‘buffer zone’ between the leadership and the ‘person in charge of the investigation.’ ”

  For Kraske, who had been deeply involved in both the Bundy and the Green River cases within the space of seven years, that meant that the sheriff himself should have been ready to step up and be responsible for whatever happened in the Green River cases, as well as help get the funding the investigation desperately needed. But there were three sheriffs during the late seventies to 1983, and Kraske felt he had no support from any of them, not until Vern Thomas became the head man.

  The 1982–83 Green River budget was a little under $10,000. One day, far in the future, the task force tab would be estimated at $30 million, and even that wasn’t enough. But in 1983 that would have sounded like an impossible brave new world of forensic science and its attendant costs.

  “That is not to say I am abdicating from any mistakes that were made during my involvement,” Kraske said. “It’s just that it would have made things a little less difficult if you had known that you had the support these investigations demanded.”

  Kraske saluted Sheriff Vern Thomas, and executives Randy Revelle and Paul Barden because they were committed to helping the task force as it metamorphosed over the years.