Текст книги "Green River, Running Red. The Real Story of the Green River Killer - America's Deadliest Serial Murderer"

Автор книги: Ann Rule

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

17

DURING the summer of 1983, the newspapers around Seattle ran a lot of stories about women who might or might not be missing, but they were seldom on the front page. And no two articles tabulated the same names. Some said a dozen were missing; other coverage wondered if it might be as many as nineteen. And they all vastly underrated the inherent danger of a deadly hunter who roved unchecked throughout King County. Somehow, he was still blending into the background, never drawing attention to himself.

Keli McGinness was the last to disappear in June, as far as the police knew. Coincidentally, the next girl on the list was also named Kelly, although she spelled it differently. She resembled all the other young women in that she was blessed with the freshness of youth, even those whose only photos were mug shots where they looked tired and sad.

Kelly Ware, twenty-three, smiled happily in the pictures her family had. She had long dark hair and huge brown eyes. She disappeared on July 18, 1983. Just like Cheryl Wims, Kelly was last seen in the central district in Seattle, an ethnically mixed neighborhood a few miles east of downtown, where streets crested and then plunged down a long hill toward the shores of Lake Washington.

IT HAD BEEN almost exactly a year since the first five bodies were found in the Green River, and yet the only other victim to be located who seemed to be linked to the GRK was Giselle Lovvorn, the self-confident blonde, who had a genius I.Q. and had been discovered in the deserted property area south of the airport. Surely, there were so many more lost girls out there somewhere, calling out silently to be found.

Now, slowly, as if the earth itself were aware of the dread anniversary, it began to give up the pathetic remains of more victims who had been left there.

On August 11, 1983, a couple, who had gone to pick apples from abandoned trees in the same overgrown yards where Giselle Lovvorn was left, stumbled across bones behind three empty houses. They hurried to call the sheriff’s office.

What lay behind the shells of homes was merely a skeleton, still partially covered with brush and trash, much of it scattered by animals. But there was a skull, too. That could help immeasurably in identifying whose remains they were.

While anxious families watched and tensely waited, Dick Kraske spoke carefully to reporters. Yes, his office had some possibilities of matching the dental work of the deceased to known and suspected victims. The task force had compiled records from as many dentists’ charts as possible.

The Green River victims, however, weren’t the only missing persons near the airport. One long-unsolved mystery was the disappearance of Joyce Kennedy, a Pan American ticket agent, who had walked away from her counter after finishing her shift way back in 1976. She had never been found. Port of Seattle detectives had preserved her records for seven years.

Dick Kraske still didn’t comment to reporters on a specific number of possible victims in the Green River cases because, quite frankly, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. In August 1983, many who were gone had yet to be reported as missing. Kraske noted that, officially, there were seven young women missing—which, when added to the six girls who were known to be dead, made thirteen. But three of the missing hadn’t been gone long enough to be in the state of complete decomposition that the apple tree victim was.

Dental charts showed matches to the skull that established the identity of Shawnda Leea Summers. Shawnda, who had once lived in Bellevue, had been missing since either October 7 or 8 in 1982. Her family had looked for her in vain for ten months, and it was likely that she had been here beneath the apple trees since her disappearance.

It was impossible to determine the cause of her death. There were no broken bones, no skull fractures, no bullet holes nicking the bones they’d found. Animals had scattered the tiny neck bones that might have indicated strangulation.

Two days after Shawnda was found beneath the airport flight path, another set of remains was found buried nearby. They were not easily identifiable, and the first victim to be known only as “Bones” was added as a possible to the Green River list.

Would he stop killing now that two more victims had been discovered? Would he find that the investigators were getting too close and feel as if he was in imminent danger of being caught? If he was true to serial killer form, the so-called Green River Killer might very well be spooked enough that his grim handiwork was being revealed to move on. It had to be only a matter of time before more of the missing women surfaced. And with every body discovery, the chance that he had unwittingly left something of himself behind, some tiny bit of damning evidence, would grow.

At least, the public was becoming more aware that there was someone truly menacing still roving free. The King County Sheriff’s Office now had three hundred suspects, along with their names, descriptions, and witnesses’ suspicions and accusations. Still, it was problematic whether the GRK was hidden somewhere in that roster of suspects.

I WAS HAVING a small taste of what the detectives were going through as they fielded waves of phone calls and messages. All during 1983, I received phone calls from strangers—at least one or two every night at first, and then about one a week. A lot of people had read my book The Stranger Beside Me, published two years before the Green River cases began. They wanted to compare their feelings with my own because I had known Ted Bundy well—or at least I thought I had. Many were hesitant to call the task force directly, or they were impatient because they hadn’t had an immediate response. All the callers believed that they knew who the Green River Killer was. They didn’t know how many other people felt the same way. I didn’t mind being a conduit for frustrated tipsters, but I knew I was getting only a minuscule number of tips compared to those the sheriff’s detectives were juggling.

In the beginning, I found most of the callers believable. In fact, at the end of most calls, I’ll admit I thought “This has got to be the right man,” only to find the next tip, and the next, even more compelling.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—a lot of women were turning in their ex-husbands. Some even suspected the men they were still married to. I had once been a sex crimes detective in the Seattle Police Department for a year and a half. Combining that experience with the fourteen years I wrote about homicide and rape cases for fact-detective magazines, I thought I had heard everything. I was mistaken. My callers had been married to, or were still married to, some of the kinkiest men I’d ever heard of. And most of them lived in the south end of King County.

One woman said her husband invariably returned from sales trips with baggies full of various-colored pubic hair. Another’s husband liked to cut up Playboy centerfolds and then play at rear-ranging the severed limbs and heads. And one ex-husband was apparently writing a book from the first-person viewpoint of a teenage streetwalker. His concerned ex-wife wondered if this was a bad enough sign for her to rethink reconciling with him. I didn’t know, but I told her it certainly would have given me pause.

After hearing dozens of weird stories, I could see that the Green River cases were rapidly becoming the most difficult challenge any law enforcement group could encounter—not because the task force wasn’t getting enough information from the public, but because it was getting too much.

It was fairly easy for me to discern when a tip was from a deranged informant. The woman who believed her son-in-law had killed a hundred people and hidden their bodies in the woods behind his house seemed suspect, especially when the number grew with every minute—and my watch indicated I’d been on the phone with her for more than an hour.

Psychics with “visions” called, but their information was never precise enough to be of any help. Barbara Kubik-Patten called me a lot, complaining that the task force detectives were not giving her the attention she deserved.

Still, many of my callers were quite rational people who were worried sick that someone they knew was the Green River Killer. I typed up the information that seemed to make an awful kind of sense and passed it on. Eventually, the task force detectives gave me a stack of their official tip sheets so I could streamline the process of sending them information on possible suspects. I didn’t expect to hear back from them; they were too busy to report to me, or to anyone beyond the relatives of the missing girls.

18

HE DIDN’T STOP KILLING.

The fact that more bodies had been discovered seemed only to have added another dimension to the Green River Killer’s game. He waited exactly one week after Shawnda Summers was found before he went out prowling again.

 

APRIL DAWN BUTTRAM had just moved to Seattle from Spokane. She was almost eighteen, a pretty girl with blond hair and rosy cheeks, who would have looked in her element at a country church supper or a square dance. She was just a little over five feet tall, and she had sometimes weighed as much as 175, but she had slimmed down quite a bit. Hers was an all too familiar story. Overnight, April had changed from an obedient child to a teenager who quit school, tried drugs and alcohol, and wanted to party all the time.

She was eager to leave Spokane for the much more cosmopolitan city of Seattle, and she wouldn’t listen to her mother’s arguments against it. April was confident she could make it. When she reached her eighteenth birthday, she could collect a $10,000 trust fund a relative had set up for her. But in the middle of the summer of 1983, April planned to catch a ride to Seattle with two girlfriends, one of whom had permission to drive her mother’s car on the trip. None of them had any notion of what dangers might be out there, or much common sense.

“One night,” April’s mother recalled, “I caught her crawling out of the window, carrying a suitcase. I gave up. I just told her, ‘At least have the guts to go out the front door.’ And she did. And she never came back.”

The trio of Spokane girls had picked up three male hitchhikers on their way to Seattle, but they were lucky so far. The men didn’t harm them—they were just grateful for the ride. A few days after they got to Seattle, April and her girlfriends split up.

The last accurate sighting of April Buttram was in the Rainier Valley in southeast Seattle around the middle of August 1983. She was still seventeen, but she was definitely planning to travel back to Spokane, three hundred miles away, to withdraw her trust fund money. She didn’t make it. The money remained, untouched.

April was officially reported missing on March 24, 1984, after months of denial on her family’s part. Her mother feared that she would get a phone call one day telling her that someone had found April’s body, but there was only silence.

 

DEBORA MAY ABERNATHY was twenty-six, and she had come to Seattle along a circuitous route from Waco, Texas. She was a frail little woman who stood five feet tall and weighed only ninety pounds. She had very attractive features, but she sometimes put on horn-rimmed glasses and instantly looked like an old-time, stereotypical librarian, very prim and studious. She, her boyfriend, and her three-year-old son came to Seattle in late July of 1983 looking for a fresh start.

They were soon out of funds. A kindhearted couple met the down-and-out family in a store and invited them to stay in a room in their house until they could “get on their feet.” Debora, wearing a burgundy jumpsuit, was headed toward downtown Seattle on September 5 the last time her little boy and boyfriend saw her.

 

TRACY ANN WINSTON was going to be twenty on September 29, 1983. Of all the young women one might expect to find in jail, Tracy seemed the least likely. She and her parents and two younger brothers all loved each other a lot. Any one of them would do anything to protect her. But Tracy had had her problems, too, almost from the moment she turned thirteen and plunged into puberty. It is, of course, an age when parents often wonder what has happened to their sweet daughters, and when daughters find their parents boring, old-fashioned, and uncaring. Tracy disappeared on September 12.

The investigators thought they had detected a pattern. If the Green River Killer was responsible for these recent disappearances, he seemed to be taking victims a week apart at this point, almost exclusively on weeknights. Did the days of the week mean something important, or was it mere coincidence? But Tracy’s vanishing broke the pattern. Counting back, they saw that she was last seen on a Sunday night/Monday morning between eleven PM and one AM. She had been in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle on a loitering charge.

Tracy bailed out of jail, and she was walking along Cherry Street, near the jail, when she was last seen by a cabdriver she knew who pulled up beside her. (It was not Melvyn Foster.) She needed a ride to the place where she was staying out in the north end of Seattle, but he told her he had a fare in the other direction out to the airport. Later, the driver told Green River investigators about their conversation.

“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes,” he’d promised Tracy. “Stay here and I’ll see that you get where you need to go safely.”

Tracy had called her father, Chuck Winston, from jail that night; she had been mortified at being locked up for the first and only time of her life. The experience had shocked her so much that she vowed she would never, ever do anything that might put her there again. She begged her father and her mother, Mertie, not to come down, saying, “I don’t want you to see me in here, not like this. Please don’t come down here.”

And they had honored her wishes, fighting the urge to get in their car and hurry down to 9th and Cherry.

Mertie and Chuck Winston had been just about Tracy’s age when she was born. “I was an older woman though,” Mertie remembered. “In those days, a female was considered of age when she was eighteen, but a male had to be twenty-one, and I was a couple of months older than Chuck. His mother always looked upon me as a ‘scarlet woman’ who seduced her son.”

Tracy was born in Tacoma, Washington, where her mother had been born. Mertie was working at the phone company and Chuck was getting ready to go into the air force, so Mertie lived with her maternal grandmother at the time of Tracy’s birth. Their circumstances were such that Mertie couldn’t take care of Tracy and work, too, but she fell in love with the baby who had deep dimples just like Chuck’s. A Catholic Charities caseworker tried to help Mertie decide what would be best for Tracy.

At the time, it seemed that placing the baby in a foster home was the best plan. But Mertie’s heart ached from missing her baby. She spent every extra penny she had to buy booties, blankets, and little dresses for Tracy and her caseworker saw to it that they were given to Tracy’s temporary foster mother. “I found out later that the woman had a baby girl herself, and she was giving Tracy’s things to her baby,” Mertie recalled. “Finally, I couldn’t stand it. Tracy was meant to be with me all the time, so I went and got her, and I was so happy.”

Chuck Winston, whose talent and interests lay in military communications, was sent to an air base in Savannah, Georgia, and Mertie and Tracy went with him. They found a tiny apartment that had been carved out of an older home. Their landlady was very nice but the steamy, oppressive heat of Savannah was suffocating to anyone who had been raised in the Pacific Northwest. The worst, however, were the cockroaches.

“I’d never even seen one,” Mertie said. “Our apartment had a huge kitchen—compared to the rest of the place—with a big old stove. It was pushed so close to the wall that I was afraid the electric cord might be wearing through, so I pushed and pulled it out into the room a little bit. Well! There was a large hole in the wall, and these cockroaches came flooding out all over the walls and floor. Tracy thought it was funny, but I freaked and was fending them off with a Downy fabric softener bottle. I grabbed Tracy and we went to a park until Chuck got home. I was holding Tracy and sobbing and I told Chuck, ‘I have to go home!’ He got very quiet and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get you a bus ticket and send you back home.’

“That woke me up,” Mertie said with a smile, “and I told him, ‘No. I can take it.’ We were there only six months. Chuck was slated to go to Vietnam…to be dropped into the backcountry ahead of troops and set up communications lines. Those men had a very high mortality rate, and the air force noted Chuck had a wife and a child, and they transferred him to Sacramento, California, instead. That’s where our son Chip was born when Tracy was three and a half.”

Chuck Winston considered a service career, and Mertie said she would go along with whatever he decided. But, in the end, he returned to the Boeing Airplane Company and they came home to Seattle. Their luck was teetering on the edge. By 1967, Boeing stock dropped and “They turned the lights off in Seattle.” Chuck was laid off shortly thereafter, but he found a communications job with a Fresno company. Kevin, the youngest of their children was born in Fresno.

They were a typical family of the sixties and seventies, with a little house in Fresno that had a “swamp cooler” instead of air-conditioning and a blow-up wading pool in the backyard. “We used to drive up to see the sequoias with the kids to cool off,” Mertie remembered. “The air smelled so clean up there, and it felt like home, but you could see the layers of heat coming up from the valley floor as we drove back to Fresno, and the kids would be cranky and tired by the time we got home.”

Illness in their extended families led them to return to the Seattle area, and they settled in Burien, a few miles from the SeaTac Airport. Tracy had grown to be a tall, slender girl who had a special bond with her dad. Chuck taught her how to play baseball and she was one of only two girls allowed to join the boys’ Little League team in District 7. “She could throw from center field to home plate without bouncing it once,” her dad said proudly. At five feet nine, 150 pounds, Tracy played forward on the Glacier High School first-string girls’ basketball team.

As close as Tracy was to her dad, she was a typical teenager with her mother, always taking the opposite stance from whatever Mertie suggested.

“It got so bad,” Mertie Winston said with a wry smile, “that I couldn’t even take her shopping. My mom would take her, and when Tracy brought home her clothes, I had to pretend to dislike the things I did like. Tracy would say, ‘Do you like this?’ and I’d kind of drag out my answer, ‘…Yeah…’ And so she’d say, ‘You don’t like it. You hate it, but I’m going to wear it!’ ”

It was teenage stuff, and almost any mother would recognize it. “Tracy used to tell me, ‘You’re more concerned about what I wear than about who I am!’ ” Mertie said. “And all I could do was shake my head and say, ‘You’re changing so fast, I don’t know who you are….’ ”

Things were still fairly normal for a family with a teenager. Mertie and Chuck went to all of Tracy’s games and school activities. When there were concerts or other events that Tracy and her friends wanted to attend, a group of mothers arranged to drive them there and pick them up.

When Tracy was thirteen she became friends with a sixteen-year-old girl who was planning to run away. The girl coaxed Tracy, insisting that they should run away together—along with the other girl’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Tracy was intrigued by the idea. The other girl’s father called Chuck Winston and said, “We’ve got a problem.”

And they did. Tracy always believed that she could help her friends with their problems. When the sixteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend actually made it to California, they called Tracy and urged her to steal money from her parents, take a bus, and meet them.

Reasoning with Tracy didn’t do any good. “I told her that she was too young to deal with their problems, that she couldn’t even handle her own problems yet,” her mother said.

Chuck attempted to talk with Tracy and, thinking he would help her understand her mother, he told Tracy about how hard it was for Mertie when Tracy was just a baby, how she’d had to fight to get her back from Catholic Charities.

“It backfired,” Mertie said. “She was shocked. Now, everything I did was not only wrong, it was wrong in triplicate. She said I didn’t love her. I tried to explain that I was trying to protect her because I wanted her to be safe, not because I didn’t love her. But she kept demanding that I prove I really loved her by letting her do what she wanted.”

In vain, Mertie warned Tracy that she could not always judge others by how they looked or what they said, that she could not automatically trust people. “You can’t just trust blindly.”

“Mom,” Tracy retorted, “I’m amazed that you have any friends at all.”

One spring afternoon, as Tracy was trying to determine her own self-worth, she demanded that her mother prove to her that she was more important to Mertie than anyone else. They sat on the Winstons’ front porch as Tracy spelled out what she needed in order to feel good about herself.

“I want you to love me more than you love Chip…or Kevin.”

“Oh, Tracy,” Mertie said, “I love you all differently. What do you want from me that you think I’m not giving you?”

“I want you to leave Dad and Chip and Kevin and just go away with me and we’ll live by ourselves,” Tracy said.

When Tracy Winston was little and could not yet count, she had told her mother, “I love you nine, and ten, and twenty-one!”—her little girl’s idea of the most anyone could love somebody else. But now she was sixteen, and Mertie tried to explain what it was like, back in the days before Tracy could remember, how much she had always loved her oldest child, her only daughter, and how she had fought to keep her when she herself was not much older than Tracy. Most of all, Mertie told her that she did, indeed, love her “nine and ten and twenty-one!”

And Tracy, who rushed to trust everyone else, could not bring herself to trust her mother’s love, even though it was her mother who stayed up late to pick her up from her job at a Dairy Queen in a borderline neighborhood. “I couldn’t let two young kids close up the place all by themselves.” Mertie sighed. “But she saw that as my controlling her—not that I was there because I loved her.”

Tracy met a man who was nineteen, older than she was, a smooth and glib sociopath who was already on his way to prison. Her mother detested him, so, of course, Tracy adored him. Even his own sister warned Mertie and Chuck that they had to keep Tracy away from him if they could. “He’s a con man,” she said. “He’s slick and he’ll change her so you won’t even recognize her.”

His sister was right. Tracy fell totally in love with the man who had decided to groom her to be absolutely dedicated to what he wanted. “She would do anything he asked,” her mother recalled. “And she was gone all the time—anywhere but home because we wouldn’t let him call her. We tried tough love…and she left so she could see him. She thought he was a nice guy, and that we weren’t giving him a chance.

“He controlled her,” Mertie recalled, “and even when he was in prison at the Monroe Reformatory, he wrote her terrible letters: sexual letters, demanding letters, guilt-producing letters. They were clearly designed to appeal to her sense of fair play and concern for other people, and prove to her that he couldn’t live without her. He said he loved her more than anyone else, and that she had to prove her love for him. Chuck wrote to the warden and asked him to stop this guy from writing to a teenage girl, and the warden said he couldn’t do that; it would take away the prisoner’s rights. And we weren’t supposed to open his letters or throw them away because that was against the law.”

When Tracy’s lover was paroled from prison, her parents were beside themselves. “He called here once,” Mertie said, “and I let him have it, using language I never use. I told him to stay away from Tracy. He never called again, but I think Tracy was seeing him. We got no help from anyone, and we didn’t know what to do. I found out that Chuck was going out at night, looking for Tracy. He took an aluminum baseball bat with him because he had to go to really bad places. When the police said they couldn’t do anything, Chuck finally walked into the Georgetown Precinct carrying his bat. He told them he was going to use it if he had to, and they said they’d have to arrest him if he did.”

“So follow me then,” Tracy’s dad said.

Two uniformed officers did follow him as he went to a house where he thought the occupants were hiding Tracy. He banged on the door and demanded that they send Tracy out, but they said she wasn’t there. Chuck Winston and the two cops looked through the house and found that indeed Tracy wasn’t there, but she had been.

Tracy’s parents seldom knew any longer where she was staying. She still came to see them—for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She wouldn’t tell them where she was living, but she would come home for dinner.

“We always sent her away with care packages,” Mertie said. “Mostly canned food, macaroni and cheese. For a while, she lived with a gay man who was a chef, and that seemed a little safer to us. Chuck would drive her home, but when he went back to see her, he’d find out that wasn’t really where she lived.”

The last time Mertie saw Tracy was on Mother’s Day, 1983, and it was a good visit. They gave each other a big hug and Mertie said, “I love you!” and Tracy said, “I love you, too!”

Her parents had come to a place where they realized they couldn’t follow Tracy everywhere. She was almost twenty now, and they had two other children to raise in a time when the job market was iffy. Mertie was working on commissions only, and her hours weren’t predictable.

“I don’t know if she was ever prostituting,” Mertie said. “I can’t imagine that it was a regular thing for her. I know she wasn’t at all hardened. I talked to one of the jailers on that last weekend when Tracy was in there, and she told me, ‘She has no business being here; she’s like a frightened rabbit.’ ”

Tracy had been on the verge of changing her life that Sunday night when she told her dad not to come down and get her, not to see her in jail. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “you and Mom were so right. I’m going to get myself together, get my GED, go to school. I’m going to make you and Mom so proud of me.”

As September passed, and then October and November, Mertie Winston had an awful feeling. They hadn’t heard a word from Tracy after her call from jail. She had said she was making a new start and they would be proud of her. Maybe she was taking steps in that direction and wanted to surprise them with a fait accompli, or at least with proof that she was on her way. But when Tracy didn’t come home to take her brother Kevin trick or treating or to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family, Mertie knew she had to do something.

“I thought that I would call up the police and report her as a missing person, and then they could check her social security number and tell us where she was working, or where she had been recently. And they took my report. I had to tell them that I just didn’t know where she had lived last. ‘I know my daughter,’ ” Mertie told police. “ ‘She always calls home, but now she hasn’t.’ Even after Tracy was out of the house, she always called at least once a week. When three or four weeks went by and she didn’t call, I knew it was going to be bad. I wouldn’t accept it in my heart, but I knew.”

When the Winstons got a phone call from Randy Mullinax, who was very gentle as he told Chuck that he was one of the detectives working on the Green River Task Force, Mertie heard her husband say “Green River Killer?” and she felt an almost physical jolt. She knew what this call meant—that Tracy might be one of his victims, even though Mullinax assured them that there was nothing definite yet and his was just a follow-up call on the missing person’s report.

Mertie took the phone and described how tall and slender Tracy was, how deep the dimples were on both sides of her mouth when she smiled, and how pretty she was. Mullinax had seen that when he looked at Tracy’s mug shot from King County Jail. He had also seen how scared she looked, a doe caught in the headlights as the jail camera clicked away.

Now that they had to face the worst possibility of all—that the Green River Killer might have gotten hold of Tracy—the Winstons were terrified for her. When her name was added to the Green River list, Mertie was unable to escape the fear and anxiety that grew with each passing day. She could no longer rationalize and tell herself that Tracy was all right, that maybe she had gone to California as her friends tried to tell her.

“I was actually crawling on my bedroom floor, trying to get away from myself, but of course I couldn’t,” Mertie remembers some twenty years later. “I ended up crouched in a corner in a ball. My friend, who loved Tracy as much as I did, begged me to try to sleep. She coaxed me to lie down and rubbed my back, until I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

“I had a dream. I was at Evergreen High School in the gym, and there must have been a dance going on. There was a stage, and the bleachers were pulled out and there were adults sitting on the bleachers. Those round, faceted mirror balls were twirling overhead and casting their lights on the crowd.

“Tracy was there in front of me, with that wonderful smile of hers. I could hear her talking although I couldn’t see her mouth move. She kept smiling at me and I heard her say over and over, ‘I’m okay, Mom. I’m okay now. Don’t worry about me. Everything’s okay.’