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: 15 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

22

SCHOOLWORK never got any easier for him, although he took some satisfaction in his ability to have secrets from all the students who thought they knew everything.

As much as he fantasized about having sex with various girls and women, he hadn’t had much luck actually accomplishing it. There was a girl who was a couple of years older than he who lived over in Kitsap County. They’d hooked up once and that was the first time he’d actually had sexual intercourse. She was a lot more experienced than he was, and he knew she was a little scornful of his performance.

“For some reason,” he said later, “we never did it again. I don’t know why. Just didn’t.”

He wasn’t a reader or good at math, but he was pretty good at fixing things, and his dad taught him about cars, even though, like everything else, it took him a lot longer to learn the steps than it would most people. He liked hiking and fishing and being in the woods. He liked being alone and watching people who didn’t know he was watching them.

He worked as a busboy at the Hyatt Hotel near the airport in 1965 and 1966, and then he got a job at the Gov-Mart Bazaar, a store that sold mostly bargain items bought from closeouts at other companies. He finally had a few girlfriends in high school, but they wouldn’t have sex with him. Eventually, he did meet a girl who would agree to go steady with him. He bought a hamburger from the fast-food place where she worked, and when he took a bite, he found she’d slipped in a piece of paper with her name and phone number on it. On a date, he attempted to have sex with her at a drive-in movie, but he ejaculated prematurely before he even entered her. After that, they had intercourse regularly.

HE HAD HAD so much difficulty with reading and academic subjects that getting through school seemed an endless process. He was twenty when he graduated, and he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do in life. He considered joining the service and learning a trade there.

The war in Vietnam still raged and he stood a good chance of being drafted, so he joined the navy. Before he was sent to his duty station in San Diego, he got married to his steady girlfriend, Heather. They had a “military wedding,” as he described it, at Fort Lawton in Seattle.

She was a year younger than he was. They were married by a military chaplain in August 1970, and she moved with him to San Diego. They seemed to get along all right for the months he was in training in California, although he was on a ship for several days each week. When he was in port, they had sex a few times a day. Other than that, they didn’t do much that was very exciting, but she seemed happy enough to him.

And then he shipped out to sea for several months. She was alone in a strange city in a strange state. Neither of them was very mature, and they began to accuse each other of infidelity. Since writing was difficult for him, his letters weren’t particularly tactful.

Actually, they were both cheating. He didn’t feel that visiting prostitutes when he was away from home should count, as he had a very strong sex drive. He formed fleeting relationships with a half-dozen Filipina prostitutes. She was bored and lonely, and moved in with another young woman—a girl who was married to a marine. And she began to date, too.

He checked into sick bay because it hurt to pee, and was told that he had a venereal disease. He was very angry about that because he had already had gonorrhea once. Maybe he thought it was like the measles or mumps and he wouldn’t get it again, but he was really steamed this time. Apparently the cautionary films shown by the navy failed to make an impression on him. He had rarely worn condoms, but a long time later he insisted he didn’t blame the Filipina prostitutes. They had always treated him well and introduced him to more exotic sexual practices than the missionary position.

He had been an angry boy and his rage grew when he became an adult, although he kept a very tight lid on it. He was still drifting and apparently had no insight at all into his own motivations for doing things.

His bride recalled that when he returned from sea duty, she confessed to him that she had been so lonely that she had dated other men. He would steadfastly deny that he ever knew for sure whether she had been unfaithful and assert that he didn’t question her at all when he was transferred to Washington and she suggested he drive back to Seattle on his own.

He left his young wife in San Diego. It was a fatal blow to their marriage. He prevailed upon her to come back to Seattle, and she did, but she stayed only a week, telling him “This marriage isn’t working” as she left for the airport.

Inside, he had never been that sure of himself, and being cuck-olded hit him harder than it would most men. He branded his wife a “whore” and they were divorced less than a year after their marriage.

He wasn’t soured on marriage, however. He was anxious to meet another woman, one he could trust. He quickly began frequenting places where he could meet women, and he dated three or four of them in rapid succession, although none of his relationships lasted more than a few months.

And once he had discovered prostitutes, he patronized them, too.

23

IT TOOK A WHILE for Jerry Alexander to track down Bridget Meehan’s old boyfriend Ray. The Port of Seattle detective was still assigned to her case since her body was found within his department’s jurisdiction. Ray was pretty foggy at first about his life with Bridget, but his memory grew clearer with every contact. Finally, he admitted that Bridget had been working the Strip. Asked if he remembered any particular johns, he recalled her talking about one who drove a blue sports car with a vanity plate.

Alexander ran the vanity plates through the Department of Motor Vehicles in Olympia and got a hit on the second one that seemed right. It was for a blue Karmann Ghia whose registered owner lived within two miles of the Strip.

The man was in his thirties and seemed normal enough, almost meek in demeanor. He admitted readily that he occasionally paid for sex, and that he’d been with Bridget. “I’m attracted to girls with big breasts, and I saw her walking her dog near Larry’s,” he said. “She had a lonely look about her.”

He didn’t seem a likely suspect; his answers were forthright, and the task force detectives had questioned hundreds of men who had either been turned in by tipsters or arrested by undercover officers posing as “prostitutes.” Many of them seemed far more sinister than this guy.

Alexander ran the man through records and got somewhat shocking results. He had a record as a mental case. Another detective had contacted him on a report totally unconnected to the Green River murders. “He’s 219-5/16th,” the other officer said. (In Washington State, mental cases are referred to as “220s” because police officers back in the very early days received a bonus of $2.20 for arresting such potentially dangerous subjects.) “He thinks he’s a spy, he’s suicidal, and sometimes he carries a nine millimeter.”

But he probably hadn’t killed Bridget Meehan; he had a solid alibi for the time period when she disappeared.

AS 1983 DREW TO A CLOSE, Sheriff Vern Thomas pleaded with King County politicos for funding that would allow the investigation to be expanded, and while some listened with concern, at least one voiced his doubt that the county’s image would be much improved by spending taxpayers’ money on investigating the murders of “hookers.”

It was an appalling comment, but it reflected the opinions of some citizens. It was an odd November. While some people were angry at the girls who were forced to work the streets even though they were frightened, there was another contingent accusing the task force of failing to care about the victims just because they were prostitutes.

The solid citizens marched, carrying signs that said “Clean up our community!” and “No more prostitution!” Little League moms walked beside their uniformed sons, and mothers pushed their babies in strollers with balloons tied to them. They carried signs in their parade that demanded action. One woman said she was terrified that the Green River Killer might start abducting “nice” girls and killing them.

Seventy-five people crowded into the South Central School District boardroom and demanded that the sheriff’s office do more about keeping prostitution away from their children.

“We’ll never stop prostitution,” the businessman who had organized the meeting announced, “but get them out of our community!” The self-righteous businessman backed down only a little, allowing that probably the dead girls were somebody’s daughters and their parents must be grieving.

Lieutenant Dan Nolan, a seasoned and dedicated investigator, who had been working the Green River cases for months, suggested a whole new concept to many of those outraged citizens. Perhaps they might exert a little pressure on the johns, rather than condemning the girls they paid to have sex with.

To the people who had gathered there, it seemed a very backward way of approaching the problem. They nodded as someone said that everybody knew that it was the prostitutes themselves who were the cause of the problem. Scarlet women with no respect for themselves. Trollops. Promiscuous women who chose the lazy way to make a living. They had seen hookers in movies and knew what they were really like.

And they were so wrong. Offering sex for money is not a profession that glorifies women; it is a profession born of desperation, poverty, alienation, and loneliness. But one of the men who had sponsored the citizens’ protest dismissed prostitutes easily, saying, “They do it because they really like sex.”

To the detectives who had virtually abandoned their own families in their desperate search for the killer, the criticism coming their way was like pouring salt into an open wound. On the more positive side, a reward was suggested for information leading to the arrest of the Green River Killer. It began with a $500 donation, and by November 25, 1983, grew to $7,600.

It was easy to pick apart what the investigators had done—or had not done—in some critics’ eyes. Experts were brought in to look at the Green River probe thus far and recommendations were made. Dick Kraske, Dave Reichert, Fae Brooks, and Randy Mullinax tried to take the evaluations with an open mind, but it was difficult for them. Unless someone had been in the trenches of a ghastly series of homicide cases, how could they know what it was like?

Some of the advisers who were asked to look at the way the cases had been handled did know, because they had been there. Bob Keppel, once a King County detective, had been a lead detective on the Bundy case and was now assigned to the Criminal Division of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. In his new position, Keppel had taken a second look at a number of cases that had stalled in the cumbersome wheels of justice and brought some of them to trial with resulting convictions. He was also visualizing a computer program called HITS that would “collect, collate, and analyze the salient characteristics of all murders and predatory sexual offenses in Washington.”

Keppel had used an almost “stone age” computer to try to winnow down all the suspects turned in during the search for “Ted.” Bob Keppel was a very intelligent and organized investigator who was making a name for himself with his emphasis on cross-referencing reports, suspects, dates, times, places. Even though computers were not really a large part of homicide probes in the early 1980s, they were not unknown, and Keppel was ahead of the game in that department. He would stay with the Green River Task Force far longer than he expected to.

Despite a temporary lull, both Keppel and Dave Reichert believed the homicides were still going on. They were the yin and yang of the task force, with Reichert’s tendency to seek action and Keppel’s analytical approach. Occasionally, they would frustrate and even anger each other, but they were both dedicated to tracking down the same quarry, so they worked it out. If there was one thing Bob Keppel had learned, it was that no detective should become overly possessive of his case to the detriment of the real goal. And no department should get involved in a “turf war” over a high-profile investigation.

F.B.I. special agent John Douglas, whose forte was profiling, flew into Seattle in late 1983 to take a close-up look at what was happening in King County. Douglas, for reasons entirely separate from the Green River cases, would be lucky to leave this investigation alive.

In early December, he collapsed in his hotel room with tachy-cardia and a fever nearing 106 degrees. His brain was seizing and he was near death when fellow F.B.I. agents checked his room because they hadn’t heard from him. John Douglas was diagnosed with viral encephalitis and would not be able to work on the Green River cases, or any others, for six months. As it was, his recovery from paralysis and threatened brain damage was remarkable. In the years since, Douglas has been involved in any number of high-profile cases, including the JonBenet Ramsey murder, and has gone on to write several best-selling books.

Before he became ill, however, Douglas had suggested a technique that might be successful if the task force should ever be sitting across a table from a viable suspect. To allay feelings of deep embarrassment and shame and to elicit admissions that were ugly and shocking, Douglas said the questioners could separate the person in front of them into two categories: “the good Sam” and “the bad Sam.” That would allow him to disconnect from what the “bad Sam” had done.

It was a great idea—if they ever got that close. But as Christmas, 1983, approached, morale was down in the Green River Task Force. The few detectives working the cases complained of the same things the “Ted” Task Force had hated: sitting in a stuffy, cramped office; sorting though mountains of paper, tips, and notes; trying to find the common denominators that might lead them to a suspect they could interrogate.

The detectives who tracked the wraithlike killer had worked overtime for more than a year, but received virtually no support from the public because they hadn’t arrested anyone and seen the case through to a satisfactory trial and a conviction.

Dick Kraske was transferred from the Criminal Investigation Division in late 1983, trading jobs with Terry Allman who had been commanding the North Precinct. Frank Adamson would be taking over the Green River Task Force.

Kraske had had a lot of bucks stop at his desk in the Bundy investigation, and it had continued during the Green River murder cases. In many ways, Kraske had the toughest job in the toughest serial murder case in America. “The first year of the investigation was anything but the model for interagency and interdepartment cooperation,” he recalled. “A lot of it could be attributed to the anxiety surrounding the leadership and what the commitment would be to the investigation. One of the many problems with the Bundy case had been the ‘buffer zone’ between the leadership and the ‘person in charge of the investigation.’ ”

For Kraske, who had been deeply involved in both the Bundy and the Green River cases within the space of seven years, that meant that the sheriff himself should have been ready to step up and be responsible for whatever happened in the Green River cases, as well as help get the funding the investigation desperately needed. But there were three sheriffs during the late seventies to 1983, and Kraske felt he had no support from any of them, not until Vern Thomas became the head man.

The 1982–83 Green River budget was a little under $10,000. One day, far in the future, the task force tab would be estimated at $30 million, and even that wasn’t enough. But in 1983 that would have sounded like an impossible brave new world of forensic science and its attendant costs.

“That is not to say I am abdicating from any mistakes that were made during my involvement,” Kraske said. “It’s just that it would have made things a little less difficult if you had known that you had the support these investigations demanded.”

Kraske saluted Sheriff Vern Thomas, and executives Randy Revelle and Paul Barden because they were committed to helping the task force as it metamorphosed over the years.

Years later, Dick Kraske would comment wryly that a lot of people probably believed that he had retired in 1984 when he left the Green River Task Force. But that wasn’t true at all. He would serve the King County Sheriff’s Office for another six years, some of his best years on the department, although he almost died from internal bleeding in 1985. Doctors could find no cause and he recovered. Anyone who ever worked on a serial murder task force could probably identify the cause easily enough. Ulcers, migraines, heart attacks, bad backs, accidents, and even cancer seem to stalk them.

Over the years, this endless investigation would prove to be, quite literally, a man-killer.

In November 1983, when Vern Thomas became the new sheriff, he brought in all those in command positions to discuss a battle plan for a second task force. Everyone agreed that they needed more money and more personnel. The transition wasn’t easy. Dick Kraske would have liked to stay with the hunt. An intense man, a stickler for details, Kraske had done a good job, but he and his detectives had not been able to catch the Green River Killer.

In many ways, Kraske had been working at a disadvantage. The terrible scope of the murders was hidden at first, so in the first years, the Green River Task Force was inadequately staffed. The original task force had only five detectives, with three more detectives working other unsolved homicides in the sheriff’s office. The eight of them shared five cars. Their early-day Apple computer wasn’t backed up by a surge protector. It was 1982 and 1983. Most people didn’t know what a computer was, and were even less prepared for power surges.

“We were told that absent a surge protector, the data that had been entered had been eliminated by a power surge most likely originating in the building’s elevator system,” Kraske recalled. “We were never able to catch up to organizing all the information we were receiving in a retrieval system that could have saved a lot of valuable time.”

More than anything, it was the agony that everyone on every task force felt or would feel because they were failing to stop the man who kept killing and killing and killing. If he knew that the King County Sheriff’s Office was gearing up its efforts to catch him, the Green River Killer wasn’t in the least dissuaded from his grisly avocation. So far, he had walked away free. Even as Christmas lights twinkled on the huge fir tree outside the Southcenter Mall, he was prowling along the nearby streets that paralleled the I-5 Freeway.

LISA LORRAINE YATES vanished two days before Christmas 1983. She was a very attractive nineteen-year-old with dark eyes, thick blond, wavy hair, and, despite her troubles, very much loved by her family. Her niece, Veronica, ten years younger than Lisa, thought her aunt was as lovely as a princess.

“She was young and beautiful,” Veronica remembered, “gifted, loving, and funny. I thought she was so cool. She was killed when I was nine. And she was supposed to come pick me up right before she was murdered. She had promised me a winter picnic in the park and I was looking forward to that for such a long time.”

Lisa had been shuttled around from home to home for much of her young life. She lived for a long time with her sister’s family, and Veronica thought of Lisa more as an older sister than an aunt.

After that, Lisa lived by her wits.

24

FRANK ADAMSON was shocked to learn he would be the next commander of the Green River Task Force. Sheriff Vern Thomas told him that he would be reporting directly to him. That was fine with Adamson, and it would have made Kraske’s job a lot easier if he’d had the same direct line of communication.

With seventeen years on the department, Adamson had worked in almost every unit in the King County Sheriff’s Office, although he had such a quiet mien that a lot of his fellow officers didn’t realize it. When Adamson became the lieutenant in charge of Special Investigations in Major Crimes, Lieutenant Frank Chase was in charge of Homicide in the unit. Chase had a remarkable memory for names and faces, and he was amazed when he realized how long Adamson had been on the department. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” he demanded.

Adamson only grinned. He looked a little like Bob Newhart, only with much darker hair, and he had a similar sense of humor and low-key approach to problems. His outward appearance was always relaxed, no matter what might be churning beneath the surface. He was one of the smartest cops in the department and one of the best liked, managing even to head the Internal Investigations Unit without making enemies. In that position, Adamson knew a lot of in-house secrets about various officers, and was fully aware of the rumors that said the Green River Killer was a police officer.

It was from Internal Investigations that he was summoned to the new task force. Adamson was, however, a contradiction—a cop who was an intellectual and whose wife, Jo, was a playwright. Adamson loved the poems of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke; he was a policeman who had once intended to be an attorney. Although he often walked away from crime scenes depressed by man’s inhumanity to man and the blind unfairness of tragedy, only Jo knew it. Adamson maintained a calm and capable facade.

While most wives might moan at the thought of their husbands stepping into the powder keg that was the Green River investigation, Jo Adamson was pleased. She believed in her husband, and she herself was seething at the injustice dealt out to the victims. “I’m a feminist,” she told reporter Mike Barber of the Post-Intelligencer, “not a radical, but I get so angry at these women being killed. What it says about our culture—a man out there killing for his own perverted purpose.”

The Adamsons lived in Maple Valley in a deep woods, and that helped smooth the edges of death and disaster that are cops’ frequent companions. They had a good marriage and they admired each other’s talents. Jo had had her plays produced and Frank was very proud of her. She was impressed with the honesty that was at his core. They had a teenage son, a number of big and fluffy cats, and collectors’ eyes for chiming clocks and wonderful sculpture. Like Kraske, Adamson, who was forty-one in 1983, had once been a marine.

As the guard changed and an enthusiastic Adamson stepped in to run the task force, success seemed possible within months. He had forty detectives now, eight times what the first task force had, and they moved out of the dingy space between floors in the King County Courthouse to more spacious quarters in the Burien Precinct area, closer to the crime scene sites.

This new task force also had a lot more money. Captain Mike Nault, who now oversaw the Major Crimes Unit, had given a figure to the new sheriff and the command force of how much money he thought the Green River investigation merited, and the powers that be doubled it. They now seemed to be in a win-win situation.

Adamson accepted that his team had to begin by playing catch-up, reevaluating the information gleaned in the first eighteen months and moving forward. And as in any battle, the commander and the troops who now came to the front were fresh and confident. Those who were pulled back were battle weary. Dave Reichert, Bob LaMoria, Ben Colwell, Rupe Lettich, and Fae Brooks stayed with the fight. Adamson knew all too well that he, too, would have to deal with the media. The headlines were growing larger and the coverage of the Green River murders more frequent as the list of possible victims expanded.

“I honestly thought,” Adamson remembered, “that because I had good people, we would have this thing solved within six months. In hindsight, I think we probably should have.”

The second Green River Task Force had one senior deputy prosecutor assigned to work on the cases with them. Al Matthews joined the investigation in early 1984. He would remain with them until 1987.

WHEN ADAMSON moved into his new job during the holiday season of 1983, Shawnda Summers, Yvonne Antosh, Connie Naon, Kelly Ware, Mary Bridget Meehan, and an unidentified body had been found. Many, many more women were missing, some of them victims who had yet to be reported.

Five days before Christmas, 1983, Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s mother learned where her daughter was. And Frank Adamson had to deal with the first body found on his watch. It wasn’t really a body; it was only a skull.

“We had a list of twelve women who were victims—known victims—and not all of them would turn out to be Green River victims,” Adamson recalled. “Then there was a list of missing women sent to us from the Seattle Police Department with twenty-two possibles on it. Most of them would be found and were, indeed, Green River cases. I was in Major Crimes only fifteen days when Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found in Mountain View Cemetery. She was one of those twenty-two, and she was one of the youngest of all. She was barely sixteen. That was shocking to me.”

The small skull in the cemetery was found about eighteen miles southeast of the airport. It might well have been from the cemetery, a body unearthed by grave robbers and scattered. Vandals in cemeteries had struck often in the south county. The site was almost on the boundary line of the small town of Auburn. But it wasn’t a skull ripped from a grave. It was Kimi-Kai, found thirty miles from where she was last seen in downtown Seattle. It was out in the open, not in an overgrown wooded area where the other victims had been found.

“We thought this killer was playing with us,” Adamson recalled, “when he put the skull right there. Some of the investigators thought that maybe it had been hidden and a coyote had carried it to where it was found.”

He called in Search and Rescue volunteers to help look for more remains. “We went a hundred yards down an extremely steep grade, searching for more bones or clothing. It was so steep that we had to use fire truck ladders so Search and Rescue could maneuver on the hill. I was worried about the people searching—some of them were kids. Once, someone dislodged a rock and it almost hit one of the kids in the head.

“But we found nothing at all. It was my choice not to go any farther down because it was just too dangerous. The hill went all the way down to Highway Eighteen.”

Although they found no more of Kimi-Kai’s remains, a forensic dentist was able to match the teeth in the skull to her dental charts. Her mother heard the news without shock. She had accepted a long time before that Kimi was gone. With great sadness, she whispered, “She’s not hurting now. She’s not cold. She’s not hungry. She’s no longer in any kind of pain. That’s been tormenting me for the last nine months.”

AS ADAMSON’S TASK FORCE moved forward, the investigators acknowledged that there were probably a lot more than a dozen victims of the Green River Killer. Adamson himself believed that. Had the killer’s favorite disposal site not been located with the finding of three bodies in the Green River in August of 1982, the man they sought probably would have left all of his victims there.

But the new commander had prior experience with bodies left in water; gases formed by decomposition are so strong that he’d seen a body in an earlier case pop to the surface even though it was weighted down with a concrete block connected to chains.

Adamson felt that both Wendy Coffield and Debra Bonner had originally been left in the secluded spot farther north up the Green River where the other three women were discovered. “But once we found them,” Adamson said, “he couldn’t go back there anymore, so he had to find new places to leave the bodies.”

IN EARLY 1984, the first order of business was to be sure that all the information the new task force had and all that continued to come in was organized. “You’re overwhelmed with information,” Adamson recalled, “and it’s not very well organized. We redesigned the case file books so we could find things easily. We got the physical evidence together. We had one room with case binders listing the Missing, the Homicides, and the Physical Evidence.”

In the early eighties, it was much more difficult to gather absolute physical evidence that will identify a murderer than it is now. Twenty-two years have made a tremendous difference. DNA matching was not a standard forensic tool then. Nor was the computerized Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in general use. The F.B.I.’s old fingerprint system had grown archaic, depending mainly on time-consuming manual methods to match suspect ridges and loops and whorls to the fingerprints in its vast files.

Before AFIS, it took two months for police departments to get reports back on prints submitted for matching in a normal request. Funds to complete the bureau’s goal of automation—thirteen years in the making—were not included in the national budget. The F.B.I. still needed $40 million to completely computerize its system, and Washington State was not yet set up to hook into it.

In the beginning, the Green River Task Force used the Alaska fingerprint identification system. Tests on blood or other body fluids were pre-DNA. All criminalists could accomplish absolutely was to differentiate samples submitted as being from humans or from animal species. They could tell if the specimen had come from a secretor or a nonsecretor (meaning that a small percentage of humans do not “leak” their blood types in their body fluids). For subjects who were secretors, criminalists could determine their blood types. That seemed like a lot two decades ago.