Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  “I have always felt this person might either be in the military or have been in the military,” Brooks said. More than any psychic, and most detectives and F.B.I. special agents, Brooks could draw a picture in his mind, a profile of the serial killer they all hunted. He was quite sure that it was only one killer, working alone.

  “The odds are that it would be a Caucasian—good chance that he is military, or had a military connection, is an outdoors type, is somewhat of a loner but is certainly not a total introvert. I can’t believe that a person that picks up prostitutes on the street is the kind of person who walks into some kind of singles bar and tries to make it with some of the girls. I think this fella’s a little bit backward that way, does not come on strong—that’s why he goes for prostitutes, which, in my thinking, are the easiest victims.”

  Brooks speculated that the GRK might be a trained killer, taught that arcane skill in the service. “In other words, he could be a trained survivalist, knows how to kill and kill quickly. He is not a mutilator, has no interest in that. His sexual gratification is just with the kill.”

  Two men working together? Brooks said it was possible. It had happened before. Two men would explain how heavy bodies could have been carried so far up and down hills and into deep woods.

  Even in the most organized investigation, Brooks pointed out that most of the serial killers captured were caught on a fluke. They had been stopped because of a traffic violation or because their cars had some defective equipment, and only then had patrol officers done Wants and Warrants checks and realized they had hooked a very big fish.

  Frank Adamson and his team didn’t care how they caught the GRK, just so long as they did.

  29

  IN THE SPRING OF 1984, the reports of missing women slowed to a trickle and then seemed to stop completely. There was the cautious sense that perhaps the Green River Killer’s torrent of murder was over. Now, the thrust of the probe changed. It was as if he had divided his contest with detectives into two parts: the murder phase and the body recovery phase. Up until mid-March, the task force had found only fourteen of the missing.

  In February and March, a new cluster site surfaced, and an earlier disposal area yielded another body fragment. On February 19, a partial human jawbone was discovered in the Mountain View Cemetery in Auburn, near where Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found. It was not immediately tied to the identity of any of the victims.

  On March 31, 1984, a man and his son were hiking when they came across the skeletal remains of a female in an entirely new location, far from the airport and Star Lake. This site was on Highway 410, twelve miles east of the town of Enumclaw and about thirty miles southeast of the SeaTac Strip. The topography and vegetation along 410, however, were typical of lightly populated areas in western Washington: fir forests, thick underbrush, isolated. Ironically, the White River coursed nearby.

  The connection to the Green River investigation seemed remote to Frank Adamson. It was so far from the places where other victims had been left, and animals had dragged away most of the bones. There weren’t even enough to make a positive identification. Every body found in Washington’s forests couldn’t be a GRK victim. Still, the bones were saved, and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts would be brought in to sweep the area for additional evidence.

  More surprising were the discoveries east of Seattle. The newest site was located on the way to Snoqualmie Pass, the mountain summit where fifteen-year-old Carrie Rois had been taken by the stranger in the truck. But Carrie, missing now, had come back safely from that trip. On Valentine’s Day, an army private who was part of a convoy to the Yakima Firing Range was using a rest stop in a heavily treed area when he came across a skeleton. It rested below a cliff at the base of Mount Washington. The site was close to Change Creek, a few miles east of the hamlet of North Bend off Exit 38 on the I-90 Freeway. I-90 connected Seattle and the coast to eastern Washington. Sheriff’s personnel and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts combed the area, also known as Homestead Valley Road, for anything that might help identify the female skeleton.

  Bill Haglund, chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, tried to match the Valentine’s Day victim’s distinctive teeth, which had a wide gap between two upper front teeth, to the dental charts the M.E.’s office had on file without success.

  She was to be known simply as Bones #8. Medical examiner Dr. Don Reay determined that the woman, who had brown hair, was Caucasian, and in her late twenties or early thirties. Her arms and her lower leg bones were missing, probably dragged off by animals. Reay estimated that she had been of medium height. She had been dead for three to six months.

  That was all the information Reay released. He was trying, as everyone on the task force was, to hold back as much information as possible to eliminate compulsive confessors. The less specific information the general public knew, the better, although they also had to be warned of the danger. It was a double-edged sword.

  A month later, on March 13, 1984, another skeleton surfaced three hundred yards away, her hands and part of one arm missing. A man looking for moss to sell to florists stumbled upon it. Again, searchers swarmed over the area, combing the underbrush in a one-mile section on either side of a now little-used stretch of old I-90. They found a pair of women’s panties in the general region, but they couldn’t be sure they were connected to the skeleton, which had lain there for from two to four months.

  Bill Haglund was able to identify this second woman. It was Lisa Lorraine Yates—Lisa, who had promised her niece she would come to take her on a picnic soon. She had been one of the last girls to vanish—two days before Christmas, three months before her remains were found.

  This site in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains was quite a way away from both the SeaTac Strip and Aurora Avenue North. Mount Si (also known as “Twin Peaks” after the popular television series) rose like a behemoth with fir forests climbing to glistening white snowbanks at the peaks’ very tops. Nearby, the new freeway buzzed with traffic, much of it made up of huge trucks, rigs from all over the United States. Most drivers pulled off at Exit 34 for a hearty meal at Ken’s Truck Stop, where they could take a shower, check into a motel, or even doze in the sleeper sections of their cabs. Ken’s was a trucker’s paradise, and the food was so good that most regular travelers stopped there, too. Camp Waskowitz, where fifth and sixth grade students from Highline public schools camped, was also close by.

  What if the Green River Killer was a long-haul trucker? He wouldn’t be the first serial killer who was, an ideal job for a man who wanted to avoid detection by ridding himself of his victims in isolated areas. That was one of the suggestions the anonymous letter writer had sent to Mike Barber of the P.I.

  The new cluster opened up more possibilities. Frank Adamson ordered a thorough and tedious search between the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River and the very steep ridge that lay to the south. The searchers gleaned nothing of interest.

  There were two easy ways to reach the North Bend site. One was by going east on I-90 from Seattle, across the first Floating Bridge, and the other was by traveling northeasterly along Highway 18, a much more isolated stretch of road that formed the hypotenuse of a triangle of roads from just north of Tacoma to Auburn, Kent, and Maple Valley, ending a few miles west of North Bend. It was mostly a two-lane road with some passing lanes and turnouts, and forests creeping almost up to the road itself. The two newly discovered bodies were at the eastern terminus of Highway 18. Was there a geographical “plan” in a stealthy killer’s mind? Would there be more body cluster sites that might hook up to form a pattern? Only time would tell.

  SEVERAL BODIES had been found south of the SeaTac Airport, and also just north of the runways. The next discoveries were also north of the airport, and closer to the ground zero corner of the Pac HiWay and S. 144th.

  It was the first day of spring, March 21, 1984. Cindy Smith had just gone missing in Seattle, although her disappearance hadn’t been reported yet. Bob Van Dyke, t
he caretaker of three baseball fields at 16th Avenue South and S. 146th, was clearing brush in preparation for the upcoming season when his Labrador retriever came running up to him with a bone in his mouth.

  “I knew what it was, but I hoped that it wasn’t,” Van Dyke said.

  It was a human hip bone. Van Dyke called the Port of Seattle Police because the baseball fields were in their jurisdiction, and they called the Green River Task Force. Lieutenant Jackson Beard was at the scene as soon as he could gather detectives and Explorer scouts. A necrosearch dog led them first to a copse of pine trees one hundred feet beyond one field’s fence. There was a human skeleton there. It was that of a young female, and she was destined to be Bones #10.

  The search that followed was the largest so far in the Green River investigation; sixty Explorer scouts walked shoulder to shoulder over several square blocks. Lieutenant Danny Nolan joined Beard to coordinate the searchers’ efforts.

  The next day, Chris Clifford, a dog handler, and his blood-hound—appropriately named Sorrow—located another body in the same area. Sorrow was an enthusiastic search dog who was more skilled at necrosearch than at finding living people. Dogs trained to find people seem to be good at either live searches or dead searches but not both—a trait that can be easily determined when they are only puppies. Discovering a corpse wasn’t a victory for either Clifford or Sorrow, however.

  “These hunts are real depressing,” Clifford said. “And not very rewarding. Sorrow had this funny reaction, too. Like ‘Hey, this isn’t fun.’ When he finds something that’s dead, he gets real tentative. He just stops. I came around the corner and saw him just standing there, frozen.”

  Sorrow had found Cheryl Lee Wims, eighteen, missing from downtown Seattle for exactly ten months to the day.

  AS SAD AS the body discoveries were, Captain Frank Adamson’s task force felt they were closing in on the man who had destroyed lives so heedlessly. Surely, with the recovery of eighteen victims’ remains, something was going to break. As the investigators searched the area slightly west of the airport, they felt they were only hours from finding some piece of physical evidence that would lead them to him.

  And yet, as I write this, it is exactly twenty years later. Twenty years, and I never write a book until a case, or a series of cases, has been adjudicated. Never has there been a homicidal mystery that had so many dead ends and mazes.

  The headlines in the newspaper clippings I have saved about the discoveries of March 1984 are ironic, given the precipitous plunge of Howard Dean as a Democratic shoo-in in March 2004. It was an election year two decades ago, too, and the political commentators were just as anxious to jump to conclusions about the coming election, even though they knew that much in life can change so rapidly: “No Doubt Now: Hart is the Man to Beat—Gary Hart is the obvious leader for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination!” (United Press International).

  Despite their high hopes, Howard Dean’s and Gary Hart’s nominations were not to be, and neither was the imminent capture of the Green River Killer.

  30

  THE TASK FORCE had now looked at, and cleared, thousands of suspects: all of the A’s, B’s, and many of the C’s. They had concluded that there was no shortage of dangerous, or peculiar, men in south King County in 1984.

  A Kent motel manager named Douglas Jeffrey had a criminal record stemming from a rape conviction thirteen years earlier that his employers didn’t even know about. A good-looking man with a wife and child, he had a great smile and a winning manner. It was the philosophy of the seventies and early eighties that sex offenders could be treated at Western State Hospital, rehabilitated, and released into society without using drastic measures like chemical or surgical castration.

  Jeffrey, with his apparently stable family life, seemed to be a natural for rehab. He had been declared a treatable sexual psychopath and sent to the mental hospital rather than to prison. He participated in the approved treatment in the sexual offenders program: group therapy.

  However, when Jeffrey was released and deemed a responsible citizen, he set about proving that group therapy had done little, if anything, to change his deeply ingrained patterns. It had only whetted his appetite. For more than two years, he entered apartments and houses in the East Hill section of Kent. Women woke up in the wee hours of the morning to find a man looming over their beds with a nylon stocking pulled over his face, making a grotesque mask that hid his real features. Some estimates placed his toll at over one hundred rapes. He used a knife to threaten the already terrified women into submission, and afterward he asked for their money and jewelry.

  Sometimes he carried a camera with a time-release shutter so he could take pictures of himself and his victims during his sexual attacks. He also had a beeper to alert him when he was needed back at the motel where he worked.

  Finally captured, Jeffrey pleaded guilty to seventeen counts of rape, burglary, and kidnapping in King County Superior Court. Becky Roe, long head of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Sexual Assault Unit, recommended that he receive two consecutive life sentences. “I don’t think violent sex offenders are treatable,” she said succinctly.

  Douglas Jeffrey had prowled in the town where the first Green River victims were found. He had the kind of benign look about him that would have made young women trust him. Could he be a killer as well as a relentless rapist? Possibly, but he was eventually dropped as a Green River suspect.

  In the summer of 1983, a nineteen-year-old man, enlisted a friend, twenty, to help him kill his own mother. The woman, thirty-nine, was choked to death in the back of the battered van they lived in. Her son later admitted to detectives that they had also killed four women in the south part of King County, and he even described areas where they had left their bodies. He said he hated women, beginning with his mother. But then he recanted his confessions about murdering teenage girls. Both men were sentenced to long prison terms, and subsequently removed from the Green River possibles.

  It was very difficult not to be enthusiastic about suspects who seemed a perfect fit. I fell into that trap myself any number of times. A few years into the Green River investigation, I received several letters from a man who lived in Washington, D.C. He was an attorney there. I verified that. He hinted that he had the answers to what had happened to all the murdered women, and he said he would send me tapes that would convince me.

  But then he told me that he had played a large part in the Watergate scandal and that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward depended upon him for information. Upon hearing that, I began to doubt his veracity, if not his sanity. It was too pat.

  When the tapes arrived, they consisted of hour after hour of my tipster’s personal witnessing of an arcane cult that he said abducted women from the trick sites so they could be sacrificed. He had hidden in the shadows, he said, as he watched hooded people strangling young women in the light of a huge bonfire. The area he described was similar to the woods where many of the victims’ remains had been found, but woods and forests could be found in any direction beyond the Seattle city limits. My “expert” knew many of the victims’ names, and their physical descriptions were correct, but that information had been in the newspapers. He was so obsessed that I felt he had gone from his “Watergate” fantasy to a “Green River” fantasy.

  And then I bought a copy of All the President’s Men, and, sure enough, my correspondent had been a key player in the authors’ contacts with Deep Throat. The man’s name was unusual, and I was able to validate that he was who he said he was, that he lived where he said he did—in a Washington suburb—and that he currently held a position of some responsibility. I supposed he might be telling the truth about both newsworthy investigations, but I was more inclined to think that Watergate had unhinged him.

  Just to be sure I wasn’t looking away from truly important information, I took the “cult sacrifice tapes” to Dave Reichert and told him what I knew about the man who sent them. I let the informant know that his revelations were now in the proper hands,
which he approved. And then I moved on. If the information was good, Reichert would deal with it. I never heard back from him. If he didn’t have time to listen to hours and hours of someone rambling on about cults and human sacrifice, I can’t say I blamed him.

  One of my more insistent callers was a woman who lived in the south county area. She was certain that her estranged husband was the Green River Killer. I had heard from scores of women who were under the same impression about their ex-husbands, but this woman was relentless. Although it wasn’t generally known, Marie Malvar’s driver’s license had been found at the SeaTac Airport weeks after she disappeared. Either she had lost it there herself, her purse had been stolen, or her abductor had wanted to make it look as though she had willingly flown away from her boyfriend and family.

  The woman who called, named Sonya,* was fixated on the Green River cases, just as she was convinced that a major American retail corporation was spying on her. The latter seemed to me to be a paranoid delusion. In the Green River cases, she was particularly focused on Marie Malvar. That, too, could be part of a fantasy world. She was so frightened that she moved constantly, leaving me a different phone number every time she called.

  “I went with my husband to the airport to see his mother and father off at the B gates,” Sonya said breathlessly. “My husband pulled some cards out of what I thought was my wallet. I grabbed what I thought was my driver’s license, but when I looked at it, it wasn’t mine. There was a picture of a girl in her twenties with long dark hair. It had four names on it, but all I could see was the last name that started out ‘Mal’ before he snatched it back. He gave it to our baby to play with, but after his folks left, he reached for it and realized that the baby had dropped it. He was frantic looking for it on the floor, but they told us we had to leave the terminal because they were locking the doors.”