by Doug Merlino
A long desk runs along one wall of Sean’s office. It holds two computers—a desktop and a laptop—and a bobblehead of Washington State’s former Republican U.S. senator Slade Gorton, for whom Sean worked after graduating from Georgetown. A framed poster of Winston Churchill in a pinstripe suit, clenching a cigar in his mouth and brandishing a tommy gun, hangs on the wall facing the entrance. Next to the door is a bulletin board with snippets of jokey e-mail exchanges and pictures of Sean’s wife and two young sons. File folders full of documents pertaining to the upcoming trial are spread on the floor.
Sean roots through a stack of papers and pulls out some photos that detectives pulled off the Internet. One is of Cash Money and several friends posing for a picture while throwing gang signs. Another features Cash Money and a buddy posing in front of a black sedan while the lower part of a woman’s leg, her foot in high heels, extends from the open door of the car. Another is simply of a coffee table with a red bandanna and a fan of $20 bills across the top.
“They called their gang the ‘West Side Mobb,’ with two b’s,” Sean says. “Take a guess what ‘Mobb’ stands for.” When I come up blank, Sean tells me, in a voice conveying both amusement and disgust, “Money Over Broke Bitches.”
At six-foot-eight, Sean has stayed trim. His light brown hair, cut short, has receded. He answers my questions carefully, considering each one, answering directly and then stopping, as one would expect of an experienced lawyer. When he makes a point that he wants to drive home, he widens his eyes and smiles.
After a few years of working for Slade Gorton in Washington, D.C., Sean came back to Seattle to take a job as a spokesman for Boeing. He went to law school at night, and an internship in the prosecutor’s office led to a job upon graduation. Sean is one of 170 prosecutors in the office. Together, they process a combined twenty-five thousand misdemeanor, felony, and juvenile cases every year. King County, which includes all of Seattle as well as large portions of the city’s eastern and southern suburbs, is the country’s thirteenth-most-populous county, with nearly 2 million people. The office has an annual budget of $56 million.
Only a few months after he started on the job, in the spring of 2002, Sean was assigned to the prosecution team working on the case of Gary Ridgway, otherwise known as the Green River Killer, one of the most prolific serial murderers in American history. “It was the most important case my office has ever prosecuted and probably ever will,” Sean says. “It was the chance of a lifetime, doing what I do as a prosecutor. But it’s probably all downhill from here.”
Beginning in 1982, Ridgway, then in his early thirties, murdered dozens of women—forty-eight of his killings have been confirmed, though he’s claimed more than sixty. Most were teenagers, and almost all were street prostitutes Ridgway had picked up for “dates.” He strangled his victims, either in his home or in the covered bed of his red pickup truck. He then dumped them in and around the Green River, south of Seattle. He was only arrested in November 2001. For thirty years he had worked painting Kenworth semitrucks in the suburbs south of Seattle.
In April 2003, Ridgway agreed to a plea bargain: In exchange for life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, he would tell the prosecutors and the cops everything he could remember about the murders. The investigative team set up an office just south of downtown Seattle. What they didn’t share with the public was that Ridgway himself was going to live there—he occupied a converted supply closet, which had the door removed and two police officers with automatic rifles posted outside around the clock. When prosecutors arrived at the office, Ridgway, in a chipper voice, would call out and greet them.
“You see him every day at work, he knows your name, he shares your bathroom, he’s walking around with a SWAT team, he’s got belly chains on, his little red jumper,” says Sean, who—in contrast to his normal cool—can become visibly agitated when speaking about Ridgway. “He is confessing to the most horrible acts imaginable, and so not only do you have this that you’re absorbing, but you can’t share it with anyone for nine months or so. We were in complete secrecy. Complete radio silence. I couldn’t tell my parents, friends in the office, no one else what I knew, that he was down living in a supply closet in my office, confessing to horrible acts of murder and desecration.
“I’m still exhausted,” Sean says. “Just talking about it, I’m exhausted. Talking to us for ten hours a day. To listen to that asshole’s whiny, discombobulated voice.”
For several months, the prosecutors and police investigators drove Ridgway around south King County, revisiting the sites where the killer had dumped the bodies and then sometimes returned to have sex with the corpses. The teams left the office at five in the morning, to limit the possibility of the media finding out that they were taking Ridgway out on “field trips.” Those excursions consisted of prosecutors accompanying forensic investigators as they combed over twenty-year-old crime scenes, Sean says, “sifting through buckets and buckets of mud and gravel looking for a human tooth.”
Prostitutes were easy targets. Ridgway could pick them up in his truck, and he knew that since most drifted from place to place—and many had lost touch with their families after running away from abusive homes—police would not put as much effort into looking for them if they disappeared. His victims were white, black, and Asian. “I’d rather have white, but black was fine,” Ridgway told the investigators. “It’s just … just garbage. Somethin’ to screw and kill her and dump her.”
One day, when I was speaking to Tyrell’s father, Doug Johnson, he began talking about the crack era in the 1980s and then brought up the Green River Killer. “Those were bad times,” he said. “You couldn’t even turn on the news without seeing a girl you knew from the neighborhood turning up dead. You didn’t know who it was going to be next.”
“It doesn’t surprise me at all to hear Tyrell’s dad say he knew a lot of those girls,” Sean says when I tell him about Doug Johnson’s comment. “Ridgway targeted young girls, fifteen, sixteen years old, low income, a lot of them black. He’d cruise areas like the Central District, Rainier Avenue South. He preyed on them because society didn’t give a shit. What’s society? Well, unfortunately, it is their parents, it is their schools, it is law enforcement, it’s social services. That may be hard saying that they didn’t give a shit—I’m sure that there were people who cared and parents who cared—but not in a meaningful way that helped those girls make choices that could have saved their lives. Hooking was an easy way to make money. And their pimps would put them out on the streets. It’s a business model. And Ridgway exploited that with great effectiveness. He isn’t particularly bright. In fact, he’s a moron in many senses of the word. But he was quite good at taking advantage of a disadvantage, and he did that with, in his mind, great success.”
After the Ridgway case ended at the close of 2003, Sean went back into the regular rotation—prosecutors generally work for about two years in one of the office’s divisions, such as juvenile, drug crimes, domestic violence, and violent crimes. In court, Sean, in a navy suit, with his height and upright posture, cuts an imposing figure. In one assault trial I watched, he towered over the defense lawyer, a man in his early thirties who was perhaps five-foot-eight and wore a rumpled suit. When presenting in court, Sean tends toward formality, always addressing the judge as “Your Honor” and standing to speak. “It’s a privilege for me to be there,” he says. “I am acting as a representative of the state of Washington and so I need to appear to the court, the opposing counsel, and any member of the public who may be there as they would expect a representative of the state of Washington to act.”
Sean transferred a few years ago to the sex crimes division, where it looks like he will remain. The work—which includes prosecuting pimps, rapists, and child molesters—suits him. “This job gives me a great sense of purpose, and I’m always entertained, it’s always interesting,” he says. “I can get up in the morning and be excited about what I do, because a successful prosecution means there’s one les
s jerk out there hurting someone.”
When I ask how he sees his role, Sean says, “I guess I sort of extract justice from the process for someone who has been wronged—the focus of course is on the defendants, but you don’t have defendants unless we have victims. Their recourse, other than some sort of civil reward, is seeing the offender punished. A lot of people deserve to be punished, and this is the system through which that occurs.”
Of course, many cases don’t end the way Sean would like them to. One or two jurors may hold out against the rest, resulting in a hung jury. Judges sometimes make rulings that Sean finds incomprehensible. He tells me that perhaps one in ten cases results in an outcome where “the victim of the case comes to you and they can say that they have felt that they’ve been heard, they walk away from this hard and cold process feeling that some bit of justice has been done.”
As we speak in his office, he tells me that one case in particular comes to mind—a woman who worked as a stripper and prostitute was kidnapped and raped by her boyfriend and a friend after she refused to continue prostituting. The trial went to court three times—the first two resulted in hung juries of eleven to one—before Sean got a conviction. Each time, the witness had to take the stand and testify for hours about what was done to her.
As he tells me the details, Sean searches through the files on his computer to find a letter that the victim wrote after the case was done. In it, she singles out the victims’ advocate of the sex crimes unit, the detective who worked the case, and Sean. Without their support, she writes, I would have never made it through this hard time in one piece, and I would genuinely like to thank each of them for helping save my life.
Sean skips down and continues reading the letter to me: Thank you to those twelve individuals in the jury who saw my side of the story, felt my side of the story, and for some instant lived my side of the story as I told it to you from the witness stand. Your act of consolation, compassion, and understanding for me is greatly appreciated and will never be forgotten for you are the people who helped me move on with my life.
“That paragraph is the coolest paragraph,” Sean says, “because when you present a case, that’s what you want the jury to see. You want the jury to live in her shoes just for a moment, so they can see what she went through.”
Sean’s assignment to the Ridgway case enabled him to skip the drug crimes rotation, which is generally reserved for junior prosecutors. Drug cases such as Myran’s take up a lot of manpower—of the average 2,600 prisoners in the King County jail system, 460 are in for drug charges, more than for any other crime. That compares to 304 for assault, 126 for drunk driving, 125 for sex crimes, and 110 for robbery.
“They’re a huge resource suck,” Sean says of the drug cases. Though he has never worked in the division, as a senior attorney in the office he has been involved in negotiating plea bargains on drug cases—junior prosecutors generally do the gruntwork and then must kick cases up to higher levels for talks with defense attorneys. In those cases, Sean picks up the paperwork and has a look before sitting down to deal.
The options open to the prosecutor include asking for a straight jail term, recommending a reduced sentence that includes drug treatment, or kicking the case over to drug court, a separate system in which the prosecution is suspended and the defendant is released, as long as he successfully completes a monitored drug-treatment program. “There’s so many different factors that can go into it,” Sean says about how prosecutors decide what route to take. “On a drug case, you’d want to know how many times in the past they’d been arrested, how much drugs were involved, whether there’s an addiction problem, whether there’s any crimes of violence, whether children are involved, what the defendant has done since his arrest to make amends. Is he going to Narcotics Anonymous? Is he trying to find treatment? Is he trying to keep his job? If they demonstrate genuine remorse and are taking steps to get better, we would consider that.”
I ask what would happen in the case of someone like Myran, who has been arrested repeatedly for misdemeanor drug charges, generally for acting as the “cluck” in a transaction. “If there are a lot of misdemeanors, cases that have been negotiated in the past and reduced, there’s probably not a lot you’re going to be able to do for them,” Sean says. “When you think of, ‘Hey, where are we going to spend the limited money that we have to help someone?’ are you going to spend it on a guy who has made no effort to improve himself over the last fifteen or twenty years, or are you going to try and take the money and maybe you get a kid who’s nineteen years old, his first offense, he’s scared shitless, and doing those things that on their face look positive. In terms of triaging your resources, you’re probably going to go with the young kid, see if he has a chance, but the other guy would have demonstrated, ‘I’m not interested in turning things around.’ ”
…
One day, Myran’s grandmother and I both show up at his visiting hours but are told he has been taken across the sky bridge for an appearance before a judge. We walk the two blocks to the court and find the right courtroom, where an omnibus hearing is in session. The purpose of these hearings is to keep things moving through the system, setting court dates for defendants, and taking care of other procedural issues.
Myran’s grandmother and I sit on a bench in the gallery and wait. There are nearly ten lawyers up front, bunched around two adjoining tables. The lawyers—defense attorneys and prosecutors—are all white. Since the omnibus hearing is informal, very few wear ties. One guy walks in wearing a bike helmet and a yellow waterproof backpack. It’s Friday, and there’s a bit of relief in the air. The lawyers joke and laugh while they shuffle their papers and await their turns before the judge.
Defendants who are not being held in jail arrive and sit on the benches near us. Defense lawyers approach and ask them their names: “Are you Mr. Davis?” At one point, a female lawyer approaches Mrs. Barnes and me with a puzzled look. “Do you need to sign in?” she asks. “We’re just here for support,” Mrs. Barnes answers. Other defendants are brought in from the jail one at a time. As they enter the courtroom, one of the guards escorting them takes a key and releases their handcuffs. Whatever they did on the outside, inside the court, in their red jailhouse outfits, in front of the judge, they all look like they have shrunk. All of the defendants brought in from the jail while we wait are either black, Latino, or Asian.
Mrs. Barnes and I talk as we pass the time. A petite woman in a long denim skirt and white blouse, she tells me about her nursing jobs after she moved out to Seattle from St. Louis, and how Myran, as a kid, used to come down after school to the retirement home where she worked evenings to hang out until the end of her shift. “Myran used to stay up, help the old folks eat, play cards with them, give them rides in their wheelchairs, talk with them,” Mrs. Barnes says. “They all remembered Myran. When he didn’t come, they would ask where he was. They had Alzheimer’s—they couldn’t remember their own families, but they remembered Myran.”
We watch for Myran’s attorney, but there is no sign of him. Mrs. Barnes tells me about the work-release program that Myran had left. “It was terrible,” she says. “There were lots of drugs available.” People in the program paid $400 a month for room and board, she says. You were expected to find your own job—the program did not set you up—and for many it was hard to come up with even $400. “There was just not enough support,” she says. “The system is set up so they fail. The government is behind it. How many poor blacks, poor whites, and Latinos are importing the drugs? It’s a business. They could stop it if they wanted to.”
She continues, “I’m not saying that they haven’t done anything wrong, but these are people with drug problems. You don’t send them to prison for that.”
After about an hour of waiting, Mrs. Barnes goes out into the hallway to call her doctor’s office, where she has an appointment. I walk to the front of the court and ask the clerk if she knows what time Myran is going to appear. She looks at a list in front of her and
then tells me that his appearance has been canceled—his lawyer couldn’t make it today.
After five months in jail, it appears that Myran’s stalling strategy might be working. When I visit him, he tells me that the prosecutor has reduced the plea from ninety months in prison to sixty-eight. By my reading of the law, sixty-eight months is the bottom of the sentencing range for the level III drug crime for which Myran has been charged. Myran tells me that after thinking about it, he has decided to still push for trial—he says that since he did not know the girl involved in the drug deal, he shouldn’t be punished for her involvement as a minor. I don’t offer an opinion, but privately I wonder if it’s a good idea: If he is found guilty now, he could be up for all of the 120 months. At the moment, the process is tied up in knots—Myran has requested a psychological review, which is taking months for the court to organize.
I ask Myran if he knows what he’s going to do when he gets out, and if he thinks he’ll get pulled back to the streets. He shakes his head. “I’m done. I’ve learned my lesson. My mind is clear, I won’t go back again,” he says.
“I’d like to learn about twelve languages,” he continues. “I’d like to be able to interact with people, be able to really talk with them, to talk with all kinds of people from all over the world.
“I’m going to hook back up with Damian and hook back up with you. Raise the status of my friends. There’s a school in Kirkland, a religious school, what do you call those?”
“A seminary?” I ask.
“Yeah, a seminary. I’ve been thinking about going to that. I’d like to do that. I just spend so much time idle. That’s not good, all that idle time.”
A few minutes later, the guard in the control room breaks in over the phone line: “Wrap it up.”
