Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  Sooner or later, the task force detectives were sure they would catch the Green River Killer in their net. If he was still out there, he was going to approach the wrong woman. The Pro-Active Team’s decoys were concentrating far more on arresting and questioning the johns than the girls who made a meager living on the street.

  But if they stopped the right john, how would they know it was him? They didn’t know that yet—unless he gave enough of himself away for them to get a search warrant for his house or his car. Unless he’d kept souvenirs of his victims, or photographs. Unless the science of DNA progressed to a point far beyond where it was in 1984.

  He was out there. But as far as they knew, he wasn’t one of the dozens of men they arrested for propositioning the disguised police officers.

  In mid-March 1984, he probably watched with some satisfaction as a group of women who called themselves the Women’s Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders mobilized. They planned to march to “take back the night,” and to point up their perception of the inadequacy of the Green River Task Force. They were joined by a San Francisco group called U.S. Prostitutes Collective.

  “We are calling on all women to end the farce of the Green River murder investigation,” Melissa Adams of the coalition said in a news conference. “It is the responsibility of all of us to take action, and we must do it now—because women are dying.”

  Men would not be allowed to march in the downtown Seattle parade that would begin at the Pike Place Market, proceed along First Avenue to University, up Third Avenue, and end at Prefontaine Square next to the King County Courthouse. However, they would be encouraged to watch and show support. The local chapter of the National Organization for Women and various domestic abuse and child abuse groups were supporting the coalition.

  Two actual prostitutes were to be imported for the rally, one from San Francisco and one from London, women who would stand in for local working girls who were too frightened or embarrassed to be singled out for the crowd. It was two decades ago, and a different era. Women’s Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. “The issue is the killing of women,” Adams said. “But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer—and victims of a sexist society.

  “Violence against women is an All-American sport.”

  Perhaps it was. Certainly, even though the millennium has arrived, far too many women are still being sacrificed to domestic violence. But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn’t the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man who was killing young women far more, if possible, than the women who marched with banners that disparaged them. To have their overtime efforts and their near-pulverizing frustration called “a farce” was a bitter pill, although they had grown used to being undermined.

  Dave Reichert, who had been with the task force continually for the longest time—almost two full years—probably felt the brunt of their derision the most. It was difficult to keep going when so many leads evaporated into nothing, where sure bets as suspects were cleared of any connection to the Green River cases and walked away.

  “What we are finding out,” Reichert said, “is that police departments aren’t organized to handle a case like this. It’s not dealt with that often.”

  That was true enough. But Seattle now had two almost back-to-back serial killing sieges. First, Ted Bundy—and now the Green River Killer. Frank Adamson’s task force reorganized, giving specific detectives responsibility for certain victims: Dave Reichert would be in charge of the investigations in the deaths of Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Leann Wilcox. Jim Doyon and Ben Colwell would work the cases of Carol Christensen, Kimi-Kai Pitsor, Yvonne Antosh, and the woman known only as Bones #2. Rich Battle and Paul Smith handled the murders of Giselle Lovvorn, Shawnda Summers, and Bones #8. Jerry Alexander and Ty Hughes traced the movements and people connected to Mary Bridget Meehan, Connie Naon, and Bones #6.

  Those, of course, were only the victims whose remains had been found. Sergeant Bob Andrews, called “Grizzly” by his fellow detectives, would work missing persons with Randy Mullinax, Matt Haney, and Tom Jensen. Rupe Lettich would do follow-up on all homicide cases, but there was still a huge job left—the outpouring of tips and suspect names coming in willy-nilly from the public. Cheri Luxa, Rob Bardsley, Mike Hatch, and Bob LaMoria would try to field those and pass them on to the most likely investigators.

  Until the day when, hopefully, a suspect would be identified, arrested, and convicted, the public would have no idea of how desperately hard they all worked, pounding pavements, making tens of thousands of phone calls, talking to people who told the truth, those who shaded the truth to suit themselves, and others who outright lied to them. It was akin to crocheting an elaborate tapestry as big as a football field, inserting each tiny stitch as new information began to match old intelligence.

  All the while never knowing what centerpiece—whose face—was going to emerge in the middle of the tapestry.

  THEY DID IT ALL without complaining and seemingly without letting their critics get under their skins. But sometimes the jeers got to be too much. Women shouting that the new Green River Task Force wasn’t even trying annoyed Lieutenant Danny Nolan because, if anyone knew how hard they were trying, it was Nolan. He had a poker face and a wry sense of humor.

  But he didn’t find the Women’s Coalition humorous. Their sit-ins and marches interrupted the order of business for the task force, which already had enough problems. Cookie Hunt, a short, heavy-set woman who was blind in one eye, was one of the most stubborn critics. She organized an all-night sit-in outside task force headquarters, then housed in what had once been an elementary school. Cookie was so earnest in her crusade and so guileless that it was easier to feel sorry for her than to take offense. But she, too, was fighting the wrong target.

  Nobody thought Cookie was a prostitute; she was just trying to help them. I used to offer her rides when I spotted her standing in the rain on the highway. She would grudgingly accept only because she knew I was friendly with the detectives and wrote positive things about them.

  Frank Adamson worried about Cookie, too. He took criticism more philosophically than his crew did. On one windy, stormy, pounding-rain night, he couldn’t stand to watch the picketers walking in the cold rain. So he invited them in and told them they could demonstrate inside, and sleep in the hallway. They accepted. Some of the other task force detectives wondered how Danny Nolan was going to react to the sight of the “libbers” when he came to work in the morning.

  “I’ll tell you how,” Adamson said with a grin. “He’ll walk in, take one look, and he won’t say a word. Watch.”

  He knew his lieutenant. Nolan spotted the hallway full of sleeping demonstrators, marched past the first office in line, which was Adamson’s, into his own office next door, and slammed the door. A few minutes later, he came back to Adamson, fuming, and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  The detectives watching doubled over with laughter. They had to when they could; there was little to laugh at.

  Five days after the coalition’s march, Reichert’s and Keppel’s prediction came to pass; the homicides were continuing, and the Green River Killer took another victim. Cindy Smith was seventeen, but she looked younger. If Keli McGinness had resembled Lana Turner, Cindy Smith looked more like Punky Brewster. All the missing girls were individuals, all attractive, but such different types. And all so young.

  CINDY SMITH had left home and was living in California, much to the concern of her mother, Joan Mackie. Joan was relieved when Cindy called in the middle of March 1984 to say that she was coming home. She was engaged and she was happy and wanted to come back to her family. Joan sent her money for transportation and was delighted to see Cindy. “She didn’t even unpack her suitcase,” her mother recalled. “She was in such a hurry to go see her brother.”

  It was the first day of spring, March 21, when
Cindy disappeared. She had been heading for her brother’s job, and the last time anyone saw her, she was at the corner of Pacific HiWay South and S. 200th Street. Ironically, she had come all the way from California to meet her killer on her first day back home.

  Cindy was white. As far as the task force investigators could tell, there were twenty white girls missing and fourteen black girls. By April 20, 1984, they had discovered a total of four sets of unidentifiable bones, and, without a full skull and jaw, they couldn’t be sure whether those were the final remains of Caucasian or African-American victims. They didn’t even know if they had found all of the Green River victims. There were a number of names on the Green River Victim/Missing Person List that had an asterisk next to them, signifying “Not on Official List.” Quite likely, there were names that should have been reported and never were.

  Every expert on this “new” kind of murderer said that they don’t stop killing of their own accord. Serial killers don’t quit. But something must have changed in the GRK’s life, making him less hungry for murder or causing his rituals to become more difficult. Maybe he had less privacy. Maybe he was happy, which seemed unlikely.

  In truth, he might have been running a little scared. Although the investigators didn’t yet realize it, he had already walked into one of the snares they’d set on Pac HiWay, and been questioned by Detective Randy Mullinax, who had worked this daunting serial murder investigation almost from the beginning. Mullinax had noticed how often he was on the highway and the way his eyes followed the girls on the street. He took his information, wrote out a field investigation report (F.I.R.), and let him go. He was only one face among so many and he hadn’t appeared to be a viable suspect. The man admitted he liked paying for sex, but he had a solid work record, a local address, and he hardly seemed the type.

  The quiet man wasn’t really that concerned about being stopped. He figured the cop wouldn’t remember him. Actually, he was wrong. Mullinax’s antennae had gone up and he recalled that stop well, although he couldn’t really say why. Just a longtime cop’s “hinky” feeling.

  Indeed, the confident man would be stopped again, admitting this time to Detective Larry Gross that he patronized prostitutes, but he seemed to be a totally nonthreatening type, just another guy in a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap, a blue-collar working stiff, single.

  27

  AFTER HIS FIRST WIFE left him and returned to San Diego, he’d begun to look for female companionship. He was in his early twenties then as he cruised “the loop” in Renton, a Boeing town about seven miles east of Burien and Tukwila where he grew up. On weekend nights, the loop was filled with cars that circled past the high school and the theaters again and again, cruising with windows down and music blasting. The crowd was mostly made up of students, but some of the drivers were a little older. It was a casual place to meet someone.

  He met a woman named Dana Brown* when he saw her and pulled close to her car on the Renton Loop. They exchanged names and phone numbers. She was quite different from his ex-wife. Dana was short and very, very heavy. She had a sweet face, but she’d never really dated when she went to Mount Tahoma High School in Maple Valley because the boys all wanted cheerleader types. She was very nice to him, and thrilled that he was so interested in her.

  She found him fun and funny, and he liked her because she acted as if he were wonderful. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t particularly intelligent. Once he was out of school and out of the service, most people seemed to accept him as a regular person, and not someone to be left behind. His ego needed the attention he got from Dana after what had happened in his marriage. It wasn’t very long before they had moved in together in his tiny house in Maple Valley Heights. It was isolated and power lines zinged over the backyard, making a lot of people veer away from it, especially when the television news said that scientists warned that living too close to power lines could cause cancer.

  Since he was old enough, he’d always had a job, and he had begun to work at the Kenworth Truck Company. He wasn’t making much money, but he was learning a lot about painting the mammoth rigs that could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His ten-mile commute over country roads from Maple Valley was easy in the early seventies; it was long before builders began to carve wide swaths out of the evergreen forests surrounding Seattle to accommodate housing developments with names like Firwood Heights and Cedar Mist Estates.

  Maryann Hepburn* hadn’t seen Dana for years, although she remembered her from high school. Maryann’s last name was Carlson then and she was a senior at Tahoma, two years older than Dana. “You know how younger girls will kind of attach themselves to you in high school?” she asks. “Well, I was Girls’ Club president, and I was overweight. These two sophomores—Dana and Carol—were fat, too, and every time I turned around, there they were, my chubby sophomore groupies. I guess I was proving to them that you could be chubby and popular at the same time. So I got to know them, and was friendly with them, but there’s a big difference between sophomores and seniors in high school.”

  Dana and her family had moved to Washington State from one of the southern states where they had a little farm. Maryann went home with Dana once in a while and she could see that the Browns were totally into country-western music. “Her dad, who was a lot older than her mother, played the fiddle and Dana played the guitar. They belonged to some group called Country Fiddlers or something like that, and they used to play songs on the radio sometimes, and go to hoedowns, or whatever, where the fiddlers competed.”

  After she graduated from Mount Tahoma, Maryann Hepburn went to business school in downtown Seattle, and lost touch with Dana. “I met my husband on a blind date, and he was from Miami, so we moved there for a while,” she said. “I hated everything about it. It was flat and hot and humid. I was so glad to get back to Washington. It was a little after that when Dana called me.”

  Dana said she was married now and was calling to tell Maryann that she had just had a baby boy: Chad.* “He was way, way premature,” Dana said, “and I had to have an emergency C-section because he wasn’t breathing right or his heart was too slow, or something like that.”

  Chad was in Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in Seattle in an incubator, and Dana said she had no transportation to visit him. Her husband was working nights, and they had only one car. Maryann, who had had a baby girl herself six months earlier, felt sorry for Dana and volunteered to drive her.

  As Dana led her toward the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nursery, she warned her friend, “He’s a little small.”

  “He was so small,” Maryann remembered, “I don’t think he weighed even two pounds. I’d never seen a baby so tiny. It was a miracle that he lived at all.”

  But Chad did live, and he finally weighed enough so that his parents could take him home. Maryann and Dana, reunited, found they had a lot more in common than they had in high school. Their husbands worked for companies that were practically next door to each other, and they were outdoor guys who liked to cut wood together or fish while the wives visited.

  Maryann was never sure just when Dana married her husband, but she knew that she was his second wife. She had the impression that they got married after Dana became pregnant, but it didn’t matter because they seemed happy together. “I liked him,” Maryann said. “His eyes twinkled and he had a great smile. What is the word? Charismatic. He was charismatic. He really wanted people to like him—so much so that he went out of his way to charm them. He was the kind of guy who would stop and help if your car broke down beside the road, always anxious to lend a hand. Dana was the same way, wanting friends.”

  It seemed to Maryann that Dana’s husband made jokes about things most people wanted to hide. He turned his defeats into funny stories. She always remembered standing next to him in his backyard in Maple Valley Heights when he laughed and said, “Well, I married a thin blonde and that didn’t work out, so this time I married a fat brunette to change my luck.”

  The two coup
les often got together on weekends for potluck dinners. None of them had much money, so they ate a lot of spaghetti and hamburger casseroles. They didn’t drink much either, but they sometimes had a glass of cheap wine. The women would laugh and say they got along so well because they were both overweight and had such skinny husbands. What had hurt so much in high school didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  The two couples went to church together, too. There was a minister who was trying to start a new Southern Baptist congregation, and he was a dynamic speaker and ambitious proselytizer, knocking on doors to bring new worshippers into his church. There was no actual church building yet, so they held their Sunday and Wednesday services in the Aqua Barn, a compound in Maple Valley that featured both a swimming pool and a stable that rented horses.

  Dana’s husband often stood to read the scriptures aloud to the congregation. “He was so skinny,” Maryann Hepburn recalled. “He had his hair combed down over his forehead and he looked like a boy wearing a man’s suit, but he was very serious in church.”

  Their pastor’s views were truly archaic in a world where women’s rights were beginning to emerge. He preached that wives and daughters would be barred from Heaven if they didn’t obey their husbands. They were not allowed to wear the color red, or to cut their long hair. “Women were nothing in his eyes,” Maryann said. “We were not allowed to teach Sunday school or be choir directors or do any job where we had any authority. Dana’s husband believed everything that Pastor said, but my husband took issue with it. When Pastor told us that we were ‘Sunday Morning Christians’ because we didn’t go to every function they offered, that was pretty much the end for us.”

  Dana’s husband, however, followed the minister’s edicts absolutely, and she didn’t seem to mind. She did what he said. He and Dana had moved to a little house in Burien, and they were fixing it up. Dana chose a pretty shade of blue to paint the bathroom, but he forbade it. “It’s going to be white,” he said firmly. “Everything in here has to be white.”