After the first flurry of interest on the part of King County detectives, they realized that Rogers was not their man. He was a serial killer certainly, but not the one they’d been hunting for so long.
Dayton Lee Rogers went to trial and was sentenced to life in prison.
43
IT WAS 1988 and the centennial anniversary of the most infamous serial killer of them all. Jack-the-Ripper had stalked unfortunate ladies of the night in London exactly a hundred years before. Oddly, no one interested in the Green River murders appeared to note that. At least, there were no “anniversary” articles or television comments about it. Old Jack was a piker compared to the GRK’s toll; he had claimed less than a half-dozen victims, but his fame had magnified exponentially over the years because he was never caught.
The Green River Task Force detectives devoutly hoped that was not going to happen with the man they were tracking.
ANYONE who investigates homicides or who writes about them soon learns that there are things that happen that seem far more than coincidence, events and discoveries that have to be almost unexplainable. It is something more than a victim’s hand reaching out from the grave, or, more likely, reaching back from the other side. Certainly murder “will out” is not always true. People get away with murder all the time. But sometimes evidence and victims are discovered through such unlikely means that it seems almost miraculous, and I do not question it.
By May 30, 1988, Debra Lorraine Estes, fifteen, had been gone for almost six years. There had been moments of hope. One of her aunts, who lived in Virginia, was known as a psychic, but the messages she got were far more grounded than something ethereal. She had received two phone calls—one in 1985 and another in 1986. The young woman who called said that she was her niece and she needed help. Debra’s aunt could hear background noise and the sound of coins being dropped into a pay phone.
“I need help,” the girl said. “I’ll come to where you are.”
The caller said she was Debra, and she even knew her Virginia cousins’ first names, although she had seen them only once and didn’t know them very well. She got the names right. But she hung up abruptly during both calls. The second time, she screamed before the line went dead.
Was it Debra? Maybe she was being held captive and had managed to get to a phone twice. But why hadn’t she called her parents instead of an aunt she barely knew? Or was it Debra from some place just beyond life, making contact with the one relative she had who was sensitive to ghostly communications?
More likely, it was a cruel practical joker, one of the ghouls who thrive on making the pain of victims’ relatives even more acute.
Carol Estes clung to her hope that her daughter was out there someplace. She told Linda Barker that if she couldn’t have her daughter back safe and sound, she hoped that Debra could somehow be the one girl who would bring the killer down and lead to his arrest. “I want her to be the one to break the case.”
On January 20, 1988, Tom and Carol Estes appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, asking for information from someone—anyone—in the viewing audience who might have seen Debra. Although the show has a tremendous following, only four tips came in. All but one were vague. One caller had seen a girl dancing on a dock in the Southeast, a girl who resembled Debra. Another had seen a girl in passing but could give no specific information. The most likely information came from a rehabilitation facility in New England where troubled youths were helped. Debra might be one of their charges.
But it wasn’t Debra.
LIKE ANY CITY with a burgeoning population, Seattle and surrounding King County attracted developers with plans to build houses and apartment complexes in the suburbs where there had been nothing but forests and mountain foothills. Federal Way, more than halfway between Seattle and Tacoma, was deemed a perfect site for putting up apartment buildings, and it could be accomplished with creative financing that leveraged a relatively small amount of cash up front.
In 1981, a company called Western Hill began construction on what was originally to be called The Bluffs at 348th Street and First Avenue South in Federal Way. The land for the complex was literally cut out of a dense fir forest. Work began in 1981 but stopped in early 1982 when the company was forced into bankruptcy.
For Bruce McCrory, a landscape architect, the Western Hill project was memorable in many ways. It was the first time he had ever designed an entire project from site to buildings to landscaping. He called it “my baby,” and in an architectural sense, at least, it was.
McCrory was on the site of the apartment complex construction almost every day for over a year. More than two decades later, it would be hard for him to pinpoint the exact year that he came across a stranger in the southeast portion of the site. Panther Lake Elementary School was only fifty feet away at that point, and its playground and ball field abutted the landscaped grounds, making it highly desirable for families with young children. The area had been designated as a “tot lot,” where teeter-totters, monkey bars, and swing sets would one day be built.
It may have been a weekend when McCrory encountered the man he didn’t remember seeing on the site before. “He was wandering around the recently cleared portions of the southeast quarter, near the school property.”
Before the stranger noticed him, McCrory paused, just out of his sight. “I remember him poking at the ground with something,” he recalled. “Why was he poking at the ground? That question kept bothering me as I tried to remember. As I annotated brief descriptions on the only four remaining [shots] out of hundreds of photos I took, I remembered. He was in a rage, flailing his arms, beating the ground, kicking dirt. Then he noticed me, and shifted into the poking mode. I guess social norms prescribe that we respect embarrassing, private displays of emotions.”
And McCrory did that. “I thought he was the soils engineer, and since his vehicle was near where I stood, he had to pass me. I asked him if he was the soils engineer, and he said, ‘You might say that.’ ”
The man brushed by him, obviously not wanting to talk further, walked to his vehicle, which may have been a pickup, although McCrory isn’t sure, threw the stick and a backpack into the rear, and drove away.
McCrory would probably have forgotten this strange incident, one that was over in a few minutes, if not for a second memory that came later. His company softball team was practicing on the ball field at the Panther Lake School in either 1981 or 1982. “We were nearly overcome with the stench of a dead animal. At one point,” McCrory said, “I wandered around trying to identify the source. The area I thought was the location was the present tot-lot curb on the apartment site. The memory is tied to a reference about Ted Bundy by one of my teammates.”
The memory went into Bruce McCrory’s subconscious mind, leaving him with a creepy sense of fear about the smell of decaying flesh. He was aware of the Green River murders that allegedly began in 1982 and the investigation that continued over the next twenty years, but he hadn’t followed the cases closely.
It would be 1987 before construction at the site began again, and, in the meantime, the cleared land would stay as it was except for some low-growing native plants that dotted the bare dirt. When the complex was completed, it was renamed Fox Run, and the apartment buildings were painted a sunny yellow against the dark green of the fir forests that surrounded them. On May 30, 1988, workmen were using a posthole digger in the corner where a six-foot fence would keep children from wandering into the parking lot. There, a huge boulder sat between two tall fir trees. It seemed the perfect spot for a swing set, if a little shady.
They found something in the small hole meant for the swing set’s end posts. It wasn’t a rock the posthole digger had struck; it was bones. From the small circumference exposed, it wasn’t possible for the workers to tell if they were human or animal bones. All work stopped and the King County police were contacted.
Carefully, tediously, Bill Haglund from the Medical Examiner’s Office repeated what he had done so many times before, working sl
owly to prevent any more damage to the skeleton that had clearly been here just eighteen inches below the surface for many years. He found a left hip, knees, ankles, a scapula, some cervical bones from the upper spine, and a skull. The teeth were intact. If this was one of the long-missing girls, Haglund would soon know it. He had studied the dental X-rays of the still-missing girls so many times and thought he recognized a familiar crown. But he said nothing as he gathered up all that was left of this victim—the bones, faded clothing, fingernails, some hairs and fibers. Indeed, some physical evidence was found with the body: a rotting black V-necked sweater with glittery metallic threads and a dark-colored bra. And on those items, there were paint chips. White paint chips.
Comparison of dental X-rays on file identified the remains. Haglund had been right. It was Debra Lorraine Estes, missing for six years. Had the construction workers dug even a few feet away, the chances of her ever being found would have been slight.
The investigators wondered if there was any way to tell if her killer had just left her body on the grounds of the apartment site where work had been stopped by September of 1982, or if he had actually buried her. The former was more likely; trucks full of dirt and bulldozers had dumped landfill there in 1987 and workmen had probably never noticed the bones, which were probably covered with brush and weeds.
Around seven thirty the next morning, before anyone else could get to Tom and Carol Estes, Fae Brooks and Dave Reichert left their offices for a task they dreaded. At eight ten, they stood at the Esteses’ door. Carol Estes smiled, initially glad to see them, and then her face paled. She knew what it must be that had brought them there so early. They had found Debra.
It doesn’t matter how long a loved one has been gone. The final shutting of a door on hope is agonizing. Carol Estes talked by phone to Bill Haglund and then asked to be taken to the site where Debra’s body had been found. They discouraged her from going, but she was adamant.
Linda Barker, now working in Texas with a foundation set up to aid crime victims, called to be sure a victim’s advocate was on the way to help Debra’s parents. The family asked Dave Reichert to be a pall bearer at Debra’s funeral and he immediately said he would. They also agreed to let the Green River Task Force film the funeral in case the killer showed up.
The scope of the investigation into Debra’s murder would have to be wide-ranging. How many hundreds of workers, truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters had been on the Fox Run site in the last six years? The detectives obtained master lists from contractors and subcontractors, and then did computer runs to see if they showed up in police files as any of the Green River victims’ acquaintances, or the johns questioned on the street.
The paint chips—which were scarcely more than flecks—found on Debra Estes’s clothing would be studied by Skip Palenik at his Microtrace laboratories in Elgin, Illinois. Palenik’s ability to find vital evidence verged on genius. Other than paint, some of the materials the renowned microscopist worked with were paper fibers, hair, crystals, and minute amounts of industrial dust, combustibles, pollen, soil, cement, drugs, and wood and vegetable matter. With his powerful array of microscopes, knowledge, and experience, Palenik was the definitive expert the task force investigators needed. After being buried for years, could the almost invisible paint spheres on Debra’s blouse be identified and compared to a known source? They could. Palenik found matches to an expensive paint—Imron, manufactured by DuPont—that was used mostly on commercial vehicles. He set about winnowing down the companies whose standards of excellence would demand paint of this caliber. One strong possibility was the Kenworth Truck Company.
And how long had Debra Estes lain beneath the tot lot’s soil? That was important because it would let the detectives know if she had been buried by her murderer, or accidentally by trucks bringing in load after load of fill dirt. One of the top names in another scientific area that aids criminal investigation was available to help. Professor Fio Ugolini, a soil scientist from Florence, Italy, was currently teaching at the University of Washington, and he agreed to come to the body site with Detective Cecil Ray to take samples from the dirt there. Ugolini was able to assure investigators that no soil had been added after Debra’s body was placed in the ground. “She’s been there since 1982,” he said.
That was a terribly important piece of information. Debra had undoubtedly walked out of the Stevenson Motel on September 20, 1982, met her killer that night, and been taken to the tot-lot location in the unfinished apartment complex. Why her name was added to the registration book at the Western Six Motel, along with Rebecca Marrero’s who really was there on December 1 and 2 a little over two months later, might have been a sick joke. Or it could have been a cover-up on the part of the Green River Killer.
44
IN THE MID- TO LATE EIGHTIES, there were several areas in the United States and Canada where serial killers were at work. Honolulu police were investigating the murders of four women in their late teens and early twenties, all Caucasian, who had been killed between spring of 1985 and April of 1986. None of them was connected to prostitution. It was a stretch to connect them to the Green River murders.
More likely, the San Diego serial killer or, more probably, killers, were deemed to have begun a murderous marathon in the third week of July 1985. San Diego’s “strip” was a long stretch of El Cajun Boulevard. Norm Stamper, second-in-command of that city’s police department, who would become Seattle’s police chief three years later, recalled being asked by the San Diego District Attorney to review the multiagency investigation into a string of perhaps forty-four murders of women of the street in both the city and the county. There were rumors of a rogue cop, and the DA was particularly concerned about the possibility of police involvement in the deaths and/or disappearances of a handful of the victims.
This speculation was fueled by the front-page statements of Donna Gentile, a warm, likable, and truthful prostitute with a passion for justice. She knew cops on both sides of the law and spoke openly about that. Her sense of self-preservation was flawed, however. Finally realizing she had gone too far, she expressed concern for her safety because she was a rabble-rouser who made people nervous.
It was too late. Shortly after Donna Gentile was interviewed on the evening television news, she disappeared. Her strangled body was found in the hills east of San Diego. She had been sexually assaulted, and her lungs were full of aspirated pea gravel, indicating that her killer had purposely jammed them down her throat. Was this a message to other prostitutes?
Stamper read every case file and interviewed every detective working on the San Diego cases. It was clear that the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, comprised as the Green River Task Force was of city, county, and district attorney investigators, was woefully understaffed. Working in secrecy in an undisclosed Mission Valley office building, the San Diego detectives weren’t sure if they were working homicides or internal investigation. Most were talented but inexperienced. It had taken them a long time, for example, to realize that a diagram drawn by a patrol deputy of a key homicide scene was a bit off kilter. In fact, it was completely reversed. It turned out that the county deputy who drew it was dyslexic and had sketched the whole scene backward.
Since Seattle detectives had more than their share of experience tracking serial killers, San Diego investigators flew to Washington to ask questions about the efficacy of forming a task force and how different police agencies could work well together to solve serial murders.
King County detectives had a lot of hard-to-come-
by wisdom to share with San Diego’s. Certainly, the “Ted” Task Force had proved that the more agencies involved, the better. But the Green River Task Force could not yet validate that having the King County Sheriff’s Office, the Seattle Police Department, the Washington State Patrol, the Port of Seattle Police, and the F.B.I. all working to solve more than forty homicides was the best way. They had never caught their man, but they had learned a lot as they hit one bri
ck wall after another.
Perhaps both jurisdictions were looking for the same man with a killer who lived primarily in either Seattle or San Diego choosing to take victims in the West Coast’s most northern and most southern major cities. A comparison of the timing between the Green River murders in Washington State and the San Diego serial murders was interesting. The peak time period in Seattle seemed to have been between 1982 and 1984, and the California murders of similar victims began in 1985. By August 1988, San Diego County authorities had discovered bodies and skeletal remains of twenty-six women, most of whom fit the same profile as the King County victims. Eight other female bodies had been left in the city of San Diego.
Faced with more than thirty unsolved murders of prostitutes in less than three years, San Diego investigators were happy to share information with King County, and vice versa. In September 1988, a few weeks after they returned to California, authorities in San Diego arrested a man who had taken a young prostitute working on El Cajun Boulevard to a deserted spot in Mission Valley, and then demanded his $40 back after they had sex. He had threatened her with a shotgun. As she tried to talk reason to him, he reportedly said, “Aren’t you going to cry and beg like that little Mexican girl did?”
The only Hispanic victim who seemed to match his reference was Melissa Sandoval, whose body had been found in Rancho Bernardo the previous May. Task force members would say only that she had perished “as a result of criminal means,” but had not been shot.
The man was held on $100,000 bail.
After analyzing the San Diego Task Force, Norm Stamper called for two major changes. First, any and all allegations of police misconduct—from fraternizing with prostitutes to criminal behavior—would be investigated by the California State Attorney General’s office. Second, since most of the prostitute murders had originated in the city of San Diego, the police department would provide additional resources and manpower to the task force. After exhaustive interviews, Stamper selected six additional detectives to complete the murder investigations.