He had allergies, too, and his nose was always running. If he wiped it on his sleeve, his parents told him that was filthy, but he didn’t always have a tissue.
They usually lived in nice enough houses, but they moved so often that he always felt unsettled. He never really got to know the other kids in his class at the Catholic elementary school. Sometimes he had fun playing, but he always felt kind of sad or maybe angry because it seemed he had so many things wrong with him. He remembered that when he was seven or eight, he was always getting lost. That was mostly when they lived in Utah. He didn’t know why but he couldn’t seem to orient himself when he wandered too far away from home—and had trouble finding his way back.
One time, he had a “big, huge side ache,” and he literally thought he was going to die. There was no one around where he was, and his side hurt so bad that he just had to lie down and rest for at least two hours. And when he was finally able to walk home, he was in trouble for being so late, and no one would listen to him when he tried to tell them that his belly hurt him so much he couldn’t move.
He often thought that he was going to die of something before he was twenty-one. Everything he did turned out bad: his school-work, his bed-wetting. He didn’t fit in anywhere, not even in his own family. He suspected that his parents had brought the wrong kid home from the hospital because he wasn’t like his brothers. If he didn’t come home at all, he figured nobody would miss him much.
Somewhere around this time they moved up to Pocatello, Idaho, but things weren’t any better. He wasn’t very big and bullies picked on him. There was one boy at his new school named Dennis who used to wait for him in an alley after school and beat him up. When he came home with his clothes torn, his nose bloodied, and his face scratched, his father got angry. Not at Dennis, at him.
“If you come home one more time beat up,” his father warned, “I’ll beat your ass myself.”
Then his father softened a little and taught him how to fight. He showed him how to put his hands up and to jab and punch, so he didn’t just have to stand there and let Dennis hit him.
“I got Dennis down on the ground once,” he said, “and held his arms, and I could tell my dad was watching and he was smiling.” He and Dennis were both crying by then, but his father seemed pleased as he walked back to his gas station a block away.
But, somehow, he was still angry. He would think about things he could do to other people to hurt them. He was a pretty good fighter now. He learned he could hold his opponents on the ground and keep them from moving if he put his feet or his knees on their shoulders.
Then he flunked school and was held back. That made him so mad that he pegged rocks at the school’s windows and smashed a lot of them.
More and more, he fantasized about violence. It had been so satisfying to beat up Dennis and to hear the school windows shattering, and to get away with it.
He started setting fires when he was about eight—not houses, but garages and outbuildings. He found some newspapers stacked in a garage a few houses away from their house on Day Street, and he was playing with matches and set the fire. He heard the fire engines coming as he hid in his basement at home. He didn’t come out for a long time, not until after dark. Nobody knew he did it.
When he was older, he was playing with matches in a dry field at Long Lake where his grandfather owned some property. He lit the grass, and then tried to stomp it out, but it quickly got away from him. He didn’t mean to do it, but fire always fascinated him.
That boy grew up in the fifties, seeming to be such a nonentity that no one beyond his small circle would ever know his name. It would be decades before his entire story was told through interrogations and interviews and a full-scale investigation the like of which had never been seen before. His every secret thought would be exposed, studied; each facet turned and held up to the light of day so that the mundane became horrendous, the salacious channeled to the deep perversion that it was.
12
THREE DECADES LATER in Seattle, 1983 lay just ahead. Few were sad to see the old year end. It had been a terrible time for a lot of people, but an exceptionally newsworthy era. In January 1982, Wayne Williams had been convicted of killing two of twenty-eight murdered black children in Atlanta. Claus von Bülow was found guilty in March of the attempted murder of his wife, heiress Sunny von Bülow, who went into a permanent vegetative state after he allegedly injected her with an overdose of insulin. (His conviction was later overturned.) Comedian John Belushi died of a combination of speed and heroin that same month. In happier news, Princess Diana gave birth to her first son, William, in June. But Ingrid Bergman died of cancer in August, and Princess Grace of Monaco drove off a cliff in September, suffering fatal injuries. In October, Johnson & Johnson took Tylenol off the market after eight people were fatally poisoned by strychnine-laced capsules. Pierce Brooks had flown to Chicago to try to help in that investigation. The Excedrin poisoning case was still open in Kent, although it didn’t get much national media play.
It got a lot more, however, than the Green River Killer cases, which were virtually unknown beyond Washington and Oregon. They had gripped Northwest residents and captivated the regional media, but nothing seemed to be happening in terms of an arrest or charges that would lead to a trial—or trials.
FRESH AIR, views of Elliott Bay, and even windows had never been perks for detectives in the King County Sheriff’s Office. Their offices were located on the first floor of the King County Courthouse, an antique building with marble hallways and a foundation so shaky that structural engineers warned that a substantial earthquake could bring it tumbling down. Major Crime Unit investigators’ desks filled one big room and the overflow was squeezed into small side rooms that held only three supervising officers. Command officers had offices, but they were tiny and had no windows either. Rooms where suspects were questioned were cramped.
Now, the Green River Task Force met in the same hidden space in the King County Courthouse where the “Ted” task force had worked back in the midseventies. Its narrow war room was across the hall from the Narcotics Unit, both half a floor up the back stairs at Floor 1-A. Two detectives could barely stand side by side with their arms outstretched without bumping into the walls. About the only thing 1-A had going for it was that it was private; no outsider could approach it without being stopped.
Maps and charts and victims’ photographs were tacked on the walls. Stacks of paper piled up, waiting to be sorted. The phones rang constantly. It was a “boiler room” in every sense of the term.
Fae Brooks and Dave Reichert were fielding most of the calls that were coming in. Reichert still looked as if he were in his early twenties; he grew a small mustache that made him look only slightly older. Most people close to the sheriff’s office still called him Davy, because it fit him.
Fae Brooks had made her bones in the sex crimes unit. She was a slender, classy black woman with a café au lait complexion. Intelligent and soft-spoken, she wore the big spectacles that were popular in the early eighties.
Some of the phone calls they answered were from anxious families or boyfriends of young women who hadn’t been heard from. More were from tipsters who were sure their information was vital. There were dozens and dozens of calls, and trying to respond to them all and even hope to follow up was like putting one finger in a dike that threatened to burst at any moment.
A number of tips and referrals were impossible to say “yes” or “no” to in terms of their possible connection to the Green River Killer. In late January 1983, a man laying water pipes along a shallow ditch only a hundred yards from Northgate Hospital was removing some brush when he was horrified to see what appeared to be a human skeleton beneath the branches. The location was almost on the north Seattle boundary line, so it was handled by the Seattle Police Department.
The desiccated remains were of a small human. The King County Medical Examiner’s office removed the bones carefully, but an autopsy failed to reveal any cause of death. The body ha
d no soft tissue left; the young female could have died from any number of causes.
The teeth, however, matched Linda Jane Rule’s, the blond girl who had been missing for four months after she left her motel room to walk to the Northgate Mall. Sergeant Bob Holter and Captain Mike Slessman of the Seattle Homicide Unit were fully aware of the Green River murders, but they could find no absolute link between them and Linda Rule. Lifestyle? Yes. Location? Not really. Most of the missing women had last been seen in the south county area, not in the north end. “Technically,” Holter said, “we’re not calling this a murder—we don’t have enough to go on for that—but the results are the same. She is dead, and we don’t know why or how.”
BY early March 1983, the dread that there was still someone out there on the highway grew. The women who fell into the endangered category counted the possible victims and had to fight back panic. Still, almost all the young women who worked the SeaTac Strip or along the dangerous blocks on Aurora Avenue North believed that they would be able to recognize the killer. He must surely be giving clues that the missing girls hadn’t picked up on. Each working girl had a picture in her mind about who she would not go with. Many of them worked on the buddy system with other prostitutes, saying “Remember who I’m with” as they got into cars. Some would not accept car dates, others wouldn’t go into a man’s motel room, or his house.
ALMA ANN SMITH was working the corner of S. 188th Street and the highway on March 3, 1983. The huge and expensive Red Lion Inn was located there, across the street from the airport. This was no “hot bed” motel; the Red Lion was one of the nicer places to stay in Seattle, with its richly carpeted corridors, hand carvings, and exterior elevators that echoed the Space Needle’s. There was a pricey gourmet restaurant on the Red Lion’s top floor. If the Green River Killer was scruffy-looking, he would be noticed immediately at the Red Lion and quickly hustled outside by hotel security.
Alma came from Walla Walla, Washington, a world away from Seattle. Brook Beiloh, her best friend in seventh grade, remembered her as an extremely generous girl who “didn’t have a malicious bone in her body.”
Brook recalled the childhood days they had shared. “Walla Walla was still untouched by crime twenty years ago. Kids played in the streets till dark. We rode our bikes to every corner of that small town without fear and without supervision. This was the place where a latchkey kid didn’t need a key because who locked their doors? After seventh grade, I didn’t see Alma very often. She would be in class one day, and then you wouldn’t see her again for three to six months. When she came back from wherever she went—or maybe ran away to—she always made an effort to contact me. We would hang out for a day or two, and then she’d be gone. I don’t know the story behind this behavior, although I asked her one time where she always took off to, and she simply replied, ‘Seattle.’ Alma was a couple of years older than me, but I still remember thinking how terrifying it would be to be alone in the city!”
Once, Alma sent Brook an eight-by-ten picture of herself, a studio shot, with a letter on the back. Alma’s hair was blonder than when she was in the seventh grade, but she still had great eyes with arching brows. “I don’t know where she got it, because Alma never had a lot, so this gesture touched me deeply,” Brook recalls. “I saw her last in December 1982, just three months before she was murdered.”
Alma had a lot of friends, and she and some of the other girls who plied their risky trade along the Strip agreed to try to protect each other. Alma and her roommate and best friend, Sheila,* were both looking for johns on March 3. Sheila left with a man first, returning to the bus stop about forty-five minutes later. Alma wasn’t there, and Sheila figured she’d found a trick.
“Anyone know where Alma went?” she called to young women nearby.
“She left with some guy in a blue pickup truck.”
“White or black?”
“White—just an average-looking guy. You know…”
Sheila grew concerned when an hour passed and Alma didn’t come back. She had a “hinky” feeling, but she couldn’t say why. She wished she had been there to get a license number or something. She waited nervously for Alma to come back.
Alma never did.
DELORES WILLIAMS was another girl who found the bus stop in front of the sumptuous motel a good place to meet wealthy johns, and to take shelter from the rain, too. Delores had a lovely smile, and she was tall and slender. She was only seventeen. The storms of March whipped and keened around the towering wings of the Red Lion, and the bus stop with its partial paneling was cold, but business was usually brisk.
Still, by March 8, Delores didn’t wait there any longer. Her friends thought maybe she’d found a better location.
BOTH DAVE REICHERT and Fae Brooks still felt that Melvyn Foster was a good suspect. It was hard for them to write him off because he had, it turned out, known some of the first six victims, however briefly. And he did fit into the part of the John Douglas profile about suspects who liked to hang around the investigation and savor their memories. Foster continued to brag that he’d be glad to punch the killer out if he ever ran across him, and claimed that the police were wasting time concentrating on him when they should be out looking for the real killer.
Dick Kraske could see that two detectives couldn’t possibly keep up with the overload, and he transferred four more investigators in to help: Elizabeth Druin, Ben Colwell, Pat Ferguson, and Larry Gross. Detective Rupe Lettich, who had been the head narcotics detective in King County for a long time, was right across the hall and he helped, too. But the twenty-five-person task force was no more. Morale was low and the public didn’t seem to care all that much about young prostitutes out on the SeaTac Strip. They weren’t their daughters.
But silently and stealthily, more of them were being trapped like rabbits in a snare.
Spring arrived with daffodils, tulips, cherry blossoms, and Scotch broom bursting as they always have from rain-sodden earth. Hopes, however, did not. The girls who had gone missing in the fall and winter apparently weren’t in Portland or Yakima or Spokane or any other city on “the circuit.”
SANDRA K. GABBERT was seventeen on April 17 when she strolled along the Strip near what appeared to be the most dangerous corner—Pac HiWay and S. 144th. The Church by the Side of the Road was three blocks away, the 7-Eleven was a block away, and the motels that catered to four-hour occupancy for only $13 and cheap weekly rates were clustered around that intersection. Although she’d been a star on the girls’ basketball team, Sand-e had dropped out of school because she was bored, and now she was living with her teenage boyfriend. They were barely able to afford motel rooms and fast food. Her mother, Nancy McIntyre, knew that Sand-e was selling herself to make enough money for that, but she couldn’t stop her. Sand-e’s street name was “Smurf,” and she had a kind of insouciant charm, as if she didn’t take herself all that seriously.
Maybe Sand-e didn’t remember where the other girls had vanished, or maybe she didn’t care. She had the untested confidence common to the young; she was indestructible.
Nancy had been on her own with Sand-e since her divorce when her little girl was two. Only forty-one, Nancy had worked as a bar-maid for years and life was tough. Now she made minimum wage as a maintenance worker for the Seattle Parks Department. She didn’t even try to debate the moral issues of prostitution with Sand-e; she was worried about her daughter’s survival. “I said, ‘Sand-e, you could get yourself killed doing this,’ and she said, ‘Oh Mom, I’m not going to get killed.’ She didn’t want to hear about it or talk about it because she knew I was so scared. She could turn one trick, take half an hour, and make as much as she made when she worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken for two weeks. Now, you try to show someone the logic of getting a legitimate job,” Nancy said with a sigh. “I realized if I tried to force her to stop, I’d have alienated her from me. And I’d go through anything before that—even prostitution.”
The last time Nancy saw Sand-e, they ate at a Mexican restau
rant, and Sand-e talked about her plans to go traveling to San Francisco and Hollywood. “I put my arms around her,” Nancy recalled as tears coursed, unbidden, from her eyes. “I said, ‘I love you, baby. Please be careful.’ She said, ‘I love you, too. I am careful.’ I watched her walk along the front steps, and I knew I wasn’t going to see her for a long, long time.”
Four days later, Sand-e was gone.
WITHIN only a few hours, Kimi-Kai Pitsor, who was sixteen, got into an old green pickup truck on 4th and Blanchard in downtown Seattle. By taking the I-5 Freeway, it was possible to travel the fourteen miles between the two locations in under half an hour, unless someone tried to do it during rush hour when traffic backups were the norm.
Could the same man have taken both teenagers in one night? Bundy had taken two victims on one Sunday afternoon eight years earlier. But those young women were sunbathing at the same park. Was it imaginable that this man was trying to break some dark record?
Kimi-Kai and Sand-e looked somewhat alike, youngish for their age, with dark hair and bangs. Sand-e had been alone just before she disappeared, although she and her boyfriend had walked together to the 7-Eleven only a few minutes before. She had left him behind as she crossed Pac HiWay. And Kimi-Kai was walking with her boyfriend/protector when she signaled a man in a truck to turn around the corner so she could get into his vehicle without being seen.
Kimi-Kai, whose street name was “Melinda” had tried working down in Portland for a short time, but the girls there pegged her as “very innocent and naive.” With her boyfriend, she had headed for Seattle, along with several other young women who’d been in Portland, because the word was you could make more money there. But the word was wrong; Portland wasn’t where it was happening. So they returned to Seattle.