33
DAVE REICHERT, the detective who had caught the first King County case, the murder of Debra Bonner, was now responsible for solving several of the more recent killings, and he chafed at the bit. He had worked day and night for years, a familiar sight in almost every photograph of body search scenes. His full head of chestnut-colored hair, shot here and there with gray strands now, fell over his eyes as he dug and sifted dirt in one wilderness or another. As they all were, he was looking for something the killer had left behind. Just one magic irrefutable connection to the wraithlike killer. And still it eluded him.
They were moving into their third year and the killing machine was still out there, even if he seemed to have slowed down. That didn’t alleviate Reichert’s feeling that there must have been something that he could have done, should have done, early in the game. More than most of the investigators, Reichert went over everything that had been done to find their quarry, looking for some link that had been overlooked. When he walked where he knew the killer had tread, he followed Pierce Brooks’s edict to put himself into the killer’s mind, to think the way he thought.
It wasn’t an easy approach for a devout churchgoer, a family man who was used to setting positive goals and meeting them. Every detective had his or her own personality.
Bob Keppel was analytical, able to step back and see how the investigation should be organized. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the pain of the dead girls and their families; it was more that he was able to set it aside for the moment and tap into his own experience in dealing with serial killers. If he was sometimes blunt with his critiques, it was more important to him to solve obvious problems with communication, record-keeping, and matching up information that might be vital than it was to hold anyone’s hand.
Frank Adamson was very smart, very kind, and adept at handling his detectives. He didn’t have a trace of the ego that mars many command officers’ ability to accept help or advice. Whatever might work, Adamson welcomed it.
Randy Mullinax appeared to be the best at comforting families, a quality that he sometimes must have wished he didn’t possess, and he was an indefatigable investigator.
They all worked hard, side by side with the young people from Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR). The spring and summer searches were the easiest because it seldom rained. Even so, fir trees, alders, and a few big-leafed maples shut out the sun as they moved into the shaded woods, but the days were longer and there was no fog. The sound of their footsteps was muffled by the thick carpet of decaying leaves and needles beneath their feet.
In the fall of 1984, Frank Adamson had asked those citizens who were heading into the wilderness to keep a sharp eye out for some sign of the at least fifteen young women who were still missing. Long-abandoned bodies, left in the woods or other isolated places, are often discovered by hikers, mushroom seekers, or hunters. Leaves fall and their branches are bare and stark against a leaden sky, making visibility easier. Snowfalls collapse blackberry vines. Men in heavy boots break through underbrush and saplings as they look for pheasant, deer, and elk.
What had been hidden would eventually be found. If there was any emotion that still seeped from the quiet forests, it was the loneliness of someone shut away from home, family, love, and sunshine forever. The girls left near the SeaTac Airport lay in a prettier location beneath maple trees turned golden in October. That was, of course, small comfort to their families.
ONE NAME had been removed from the list—that of Mary Bello—and her mother, Sue Villamin, lived with the renewed hope that Mary was alive and well and had simply walked away from her life in Seattle. Maybe she hadn’t been able to fight her heroin habit after all. It was better to think that Mary was still hooked than to know for sure that she was dead.
Mary’s little lobster tattoo was unusual, and a policeman in Odessa, Texas, was sure that he had seen Mary dancing at a club in Odessa a few months or so after she was reported missing. She sometimes used the alias Roxanne Dunlap, and that was the name the Odessa officer recognized.
Still, Mary hadn’t called home for a year, and a second Christmas without her was only two months away. Sue Villamin knew in her heart that, no matter what, Mary would have found some way to check on her and on her grandparents, even if she didn’t want to be found.
On Friday, October 12, 1984, a man hunting for chanterelle and morel mushrooms off Highway 410 eight miles east of Enumclaw, an area already known as one of the Green River Killer’s body sites, came across a skull and widely scattered bones. Some were animal bones, but many were human. The task force and the “brush monkeys,” the young people of the Explorer Search and Rescue team who worked so many volunteer hours at every body location, moved in to gather evidence and find even the smallest bone. Sadly, they had all become adept at it, as they walked shoulder to shoulder across a very wide search area. When anything was found, it would be bagged and taped with the initials of the evidence officer, the date, time, and place. Dirt was shaken through screens to find minuscule bits and pieces of something the killer might have left behind, something belonging to the victim or to himself. They had learned to check the holes and tunnels of big and little animals, and found hair, small bones, shiny objects. By now, there wasn’t a search team in the country that could work an outdoor body site any better than the Green River Task Force, thankless though the job was so far.
In his coveralls and boots, Bill Haglund, the chief investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Office, was recognizable instantly to anyone who watched the news. So were Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Jackson Beard, Randy Mullinax, Dan Nolan, Rupe Lettich, Cheri Luxa, Matt Haney, Sue Peters, Mike Hatch, Jon Mattsen, Matt Haney, and Fae Brooks.
It was usually Haglund, however, who was able to give the final word on who the newest set of remains belonged to. After consulting the dental charts on file, he realized that Mary Bello should never have been removed from the list of possible victims. The Odessa, Texas, sighting must have been of someone else. She had been found almost a year to the day after she vanished. Gone October 11, 1983—found October 12, 1984.
Two police officers, a man and a woman, knocked on the door of Sue Villamin’s trailer and told her that her daughter was dead. She was too distraught to remember their names.
“I sort of went to hell in a handbasket for a year,” Sue says. “My mother didn’t live a month after she found out. I know I wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be with Mary. And so I thought she would settle down some day and have children, and I would do better with them as their grandmother. But I never had a chance to do that.
“I took some of Mary’s ashes home with me. And I liked having them there, but they made me sad, too. One of my friends told me that it was too hard on me. I went to the Green River and I said a prayer and gently put her ashes in there.
“She didn’t have a funeral service. My parents were afraid their friends would know what she’d been doing. Her street name wasn’t ‘Draper,’ though, so nobody ever figured it out.”
Widowed, with her adoptive parents and her daughter gone, without ever finding her birth family, Sue was living alone, by 2004, except for her dog Chico, in an apartment in downtown Seattle. She had become close to her father’s widow, who was in her nineties.
It wouldn’t be long before another body was found. Martina Authorlee probably never returned to Oregon in May 1983. She was up there off Highway 410, along with Mary Bello and Debbie Abernathy, close to the White River. A hunter found Martina’s body on November 14, 1984.
On the shoulder of the highway, detectives found the sodden pages of a collection of pornography—magazines catering to sadomasochists and a paperback novel penned by a writer with little talent but a grotesque grasp of his readers’ tastes. Was it a coincidence that the scurrilous material was there close to the remains? Or had the Green River Killer tossed it there to tease those who were a year behind him on a cold trail?
Dave Reichert and Bob Keppel weren’t in King County in mid-November 1984
when Martina Authorlee’s remains were identified. They were far away in Starke, Florida, on a mission that sounded like something out of Silence of the Lambs.
Ted Bundy would never deign to talk with Bob Keppel back in the years when Keppel was a young King County detective working on the murders of women in the Northwest, those murders that came to be known as “The Ted Murders.” Ted was smart enough to know that the less he said to Keppel and his partner, Roger Dunn, the better, and he took some delight in avoiding them when he was out on bail during the holiday season in 1975.
By 1984, however, Ted was on Death Row in Raiford Prison, the Florida state penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. He was, in essence, silenced—no longer able to joust with detectives or to take advantage of photo ops with reporters. He considered himself the expert on serial murder, and he would tell me patronizingly in letters that I “didn’t really understand serial killers,” and I was “all wrong” in my conclusions about their motivation and psychological profiles. He liked to hint at things he could tell me, and then draw back, enjoying the tease.
I didn’t know that Ted had already found an audience more to his liking, where he could expound upon his theories: Keppel and Reichert. The Green River Killer was threatening to break Ted’s record, both in the number of victims and the years he had evaded arrest. Knowing Ted, that would have alarmed and frustrated him. The Green River Killer had probably killed more women than Ted, and he had remained free to kill more. Added to his edginess at losing his “throne,” Bundy needed once more to pontificate, to chide, to advise, and to point out his superior grasp of the criminal mind. Who would be better than the top-ranked detectives from King County?
He also believed that as long as he remained useful to law and order, he could avoid the electric chair. He had nothing much to lose, and neither did Keppel and Reichert. Maybe Bundy did understand the way the Green River Killer’s mind worked more than a normal man could. Maybe he would even shed some light on the Ted Murders that would give some answers to the parents of his own victims.
Ted sent a letter to Bob Keppel in the autumn of 1984, and Ted’s former attorney, John Henry Browne, followed that up with a message from Ted to Frank Adamson and Keppel. Ted wanted to help in the Green River investigation. “He wanted to give his opinion,” Adamson recalled. “I sent Keppel and Reichert to Starke to interview Bundy. I thought he might give something to Keppel that would allow us to charge Bundy here in Washington. I didn’t think he could help on our cases. Clifford Olson [the Canadian serial murderer of children] had also contacted Adamson and Danny Nolan to offer his thoughts.”
Characteristically, Adamson told Keppel and Reichert to go for it, to see what Bundy might have to say. He probably had at least as much to offer as the psychics who still described “water and trees and mountains.”
And so on November 16 and 17, 1984, with no fanfare at all, Bob Keppel and Dave Reichert met with Ted Bundy somewhere in the bowels of Florida’s most dreaded prison. Some of what Bundy opined would prove accurate, some would be off the mark, and some would be the boasting of a massive, but trapped, ego.
At the request of Captain Gary Terry of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida, Reichert and Keppel also asked Ted questions about a Tampa man who had been arrested only that week as a prime suspect in the serial killer murders of nine young women who worked the streets of Tampa and St. Petersburg. Bobby Joe Long, a technician in the medical field, later admitted to multiple rapes and murders in a forty-five-page statement. His downfall had come when he kidnapped a teenager who worked in a doughnut shop, held her captive for days as he sexually assaulted her, and then let her go. He had believed her promises that she wouldn’t tell anyone.
As odd as it may sound, the world of serial murder is quite small; investigators and experts eventually come to know each other, just as serial killers often correspond with one another. Bob Keppel would maintain a correspondence with Bundy and interview him again before Bundy had his final date with the electric chair. In the end, Bundy offered only theories that might one day be validated, but he couldn’t lead Keppel or Reichert to the Green River Killer’s front door.
THERE were still so many young women missing, and 1984 would end without any more bodies being discovered. And, seemingly, with no further disappearances. A third Christmas passed with only emptiness for the families who waited.
34
AND THEN IT WAS 1985 and, in America, the new year started off quietly. Because January 20 fell on the same Sunday as the biggest football contest of the year, Ronald Reagan’s ceremonial inauguration for his second term in office was preempted for a day in deference to Super Bowl XIX. Reagan was sworn in legally, but quietly, as the San Francisco 49ers overwhelmed the Miami Dolphins. He graciously agreed to wait until January 21 for the public festivities.
Nineteen eighty-five was not a big year for news of violent crime, and virtually no layperson outside the Northwest had heard of the Green River Killer. VICAP was not yet off the ground, so the problem of viable connections among and between law enforcement agencies across the country continued. It was quite possible that the Green River Killer had moved to another area, as serial killers are characteristically peripatetic. Or he was dead. He might well be in prison. He might even have had a sea change in his life, something so profound that it overrode his compulsion to kill—if only for a time.
A serial killer is, quite literally, “addicted” to murder. I have heard some of them phrase it just that way. Both Bobby Joe Long and Ted Bundy did. Their “fix” is killing, and the more entrenched their addiction, the more victims they require to feed their habit. Frank Adamson and the members of his task force could only hope that, if he was still alive, the Green River Killer would surely slip up before he killed any more young women.
In January 1985, Dr. Don Reay’s office released a few more details about the four sets of unknown bones that no one had claimed. The first Star Lake victim’s pelvis bore indications that it had once been fractured and one arm was dislocated. That could have happened as she fought her killer, but Gail Mathews’s sister-in-law read this new information nervously as she remembered that Gail had broken her pelvis in a boating accident in 1980. She was right to worry. Bill Haglund announced that forensic experts had obtained Gail’s X-rays from a Seattle hospital, and they were able to match them absolutely with the skeletal pelvis. Also in evidence was a small shred of skin from which criminalists had been able to raise a partial fingerprint—enough to compare to a known print. Gail’s own finger had left its mark on her flesh. Bones #2 belonged to the darkly beautiful woman who had once aspired to be an artist. “She was really good at art,” her estranged husband said about the woman who had originally come to Seattle from Crescent City, California. “She was just a nice young lady, down to earth.”
Ken Mathews had custody of their young daughter, and Gail had often visited her child. The last time she had visited was in late March 1983. They had split up without rancor. “She just kind of got all mixed up,” he said. “She had no real home and not many girlfriends. She was kind of lonely.”
Gail had no record for prostitution, although she had lived on Pac HiWay South. Her extended family hadn’t officially reported her missing until a year after her boyfriend knew she was gone because there were several erroneous “sightings” that made them feel she was all right. In truth, she had been dead for months when they started to worry in April 1984. The Star Lake site had begun to give up some terrible secrets, but Gail’s skull hadn’t been identifiable because her dental charts were not on file with the Medical Examiner’s Office.
A month later, on March 10, a man riding a three-wheeler stopped on a sharp curve just east of the old Star Lake gravel pit. He climbed off his bike and walked back into the woods toward a steep ravine, looking for a new area where he could ride. As his eyes scanned the slope leading down to where the creek had made the dirt sour and boggy, something caught his eye, but
his mind unconsciously tried to avoid the obvious. He stared at a roundish object, partially covered with moss. Was it a football helmet?
He knew it wasn’t. But he didn’t want to slide down into the ravine alone to check. He contacted a friend who was riding nearby and the two men went back to stare at the perfectly round thing that lay half-mired in the swamp. Together, they sidestepped down the hill, holding on to trees to keep from falling. It was what they had feared: a human skull.
It was too dark for a full-scale search, but the Green River Task Force was there the next day shortly after sunrise. They met at seven thirty and discussed their plan. The killer they had followed for so long had chosen such an optimum site that they were sure this must be yet another of his victims.
But who was it? It could be the last earthly remains of more than a dozen young women. KIRO-TV was already there, and the other channels were arriving, their reporters with mikes in hand, shivering against the trucks with transmittal satellites. The detectives tried not to notice them; as always, they were an intrusive presence in the disconsolate ambience of another body retrieval.
Water from springtime rains trickled steadily down the hill and added to the mire at the bottom of the ravine. The conditions were perfect for skunk cabbage, a native flower with huge, creamy yellow blooms and large leaves. Beautiful from a distance, it emitted a rank, sickly sweet odor when it was picked by unwary hikers, an odor that clung to them for days.
Dave Reichert and Mike Hatch searched for another way into the swamp while other detectives looked at the skull that wasn’t very far from where Sand-e Gabbert and a dog’s skeleton had been buried nose-to-nose. The bones had been scattered by animals and they found rib bones—twenty-three in all—an arm bone, a femur (thigh bone), and two clavicles. They put their hands into animal dens and found little bones there. The skull had six teeth missing from the upper jaw, and eight from the lower mandible. And then they located scattered teeth.