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: 17 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

The detectives watching doubled over with laughter. They had to when they could; there was little to laugh at.

Five days after the coalition’s march, Reichert’s and Keppel’s prediction came to pass; the homicides were continuing, and the Green River Killer took another victim. Cindy Smith was seventeen, but she looked younger. If Keli McGinness had resembled Lana Turner, Cindy Smith looked more like Punky Brewster. All the missing girls were individuals, all attractive, but such different types. And all so young.

 

CINDY SMITH had left home and was living in California, much to the concern of her mother, Joan Mackie. Joan was relieved when Cindy called in the middle of March 1984 to say that she was coming home. She was engaged and she was happy and wanted to come back to her family. Joan sent her money for transportation and was delighted to see Cindy. “She didn’t even unpack her suitcase,” her mother recalled. “She was in such a hurry to go see her brother.”

It was the first day of spring, March 21, when Cindy disappeared. She had been heading for her brother’s job, and the last time anyone saw her, she was at the corner of Pacific HiWay South and S. 200th Street. Ironically, she had come all the way from California to meet her killer on her first day back home.

Cindy was white. As far as the task force investigators could tell, there were twenty white girls missing and fourteen black girls. By April 20, 1984, they had discovered a total of four sets of unidentifiable bones, and, without a full skull and jaw, they couldn’t be sure whether those were the final remains of Caucasian or African-American victims. They didn’t even know if they had found all of the Green River victims. There were a number of names on the Green River Victim/Missing Person List that had an asterisk next to them, signifying “Not on Official List.” Quite likely, there were names that should have been reported and never were.

Every expert on this “new” kind of murderer said that they don’t stop killing of their own accord. Serial killers don’t quit. But something must have changed in the GRK’s life, making him less hungry for murder or causing his rituals to become more difficult. Maybe he had less privacy. Maybe he was happy, which seemed unlikely.

In truth, he might have been running a little scared. Although the investigators didn’t yet realize it, he had already walked into one of the snares they’d set on Pac HiWay, and been questioned by Detective Randy Mullinax, who had worked this daunting serial murder investigation almost from the beginning. Mullinax had noticed how often he was on the highway and the way his eyes followed the girls on the street. He took his information, wrote out a field investigation report (F.I.R.), and let him go. He was only one face among so many and he hadn’t appeared to be a viable suspect. The man admitted he liked paying for sex, but he had a solid work record, a local address, and he hardly seemed the type.

The quiet man wasn’t really that concerned about being stopped. He figured the cop wouldn’t remember him. Actually, he was wrong. Mullinax’s antennae had gone up and he recalled that stop well, although he couldn’t really say why. Just a longtime cop’s “hinky” feeling.

Indeed, the confident man would be stopped again, admitting this time to Detective Larry Gross that he patronized prostitutes, but he seemed to be a totally nonthreatening type, just another guy in a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap, a blue-collar working stiff, single.

27

AFTER HIS FIRST WIFE left him and returned to San Diego, he’d begun to look for female companionship. He was in his early twenties then as he cruised “the loop” in Renton, a Boeing town about seven miles east of Burien and Tukwila where he grew up. On weekend nights, the loop was filled with cars that circled past the high school and the theaters again and again, cruising with windows down and music blasting. The crowd was mostly made up of students, but some of the drivers were a little older. It was a casual place to meet someone.

He met a woman named Dana Brown* when he saw her and pulled close to her car on the Renton Loop. They exchanged names and phone numbers. She was quite different from his ex-wife. Dana was short and very, very heavy. She had a sweet face, but she’d never really dated when she went to Mount Tahoma High School in Maple Valley because the boys all wanted cheerleader types. She was very nice to him, and thrilled that he was so interested in her.

She found him fun and funny, and he liked her because she acted as if he were wonderful. She didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t particularly intelligent. Once he was out of school and out of the service, most people seemed to accept him as a regular person, and not someone to be left behind. His ego needed the attention he got from Dana after what had happened in his marriage. It wasn’t very long before they had moved in together in his tiny house in Maple Valley Heights. It was isolated and power lines zinged over the backyard, making a lot of people veer away from it, especially when the television news said that scientists warned that living too close to power lines could cause cancer.

Since he was old enough, he’d always had a job, and he had begun to work at the Kenworth Truck Company. He wasn’t making much money, but he was learning a lot about painting the mammoth rigs that could sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. His ten-mile commute over country roads from Maple Valley was easy in the early seventies; it was long before builders began to carve wide swaths out of the evergreen forests surrounding Seattle to accommodate housing developments with names like Firwood Heights and Cedar Mist Estates.

Maryann Hepburn* hadn’t seen Dana for years, although she remembered her from high school. Maryann’s last name was Carlson then and she was a senior at Tahoma, two years older than Dana. “You know how younger girls will kind of attach themselves to you in high school?” she asks. “Well, I was Girls’ Club president, and I was overweight. These two sophomores—Dana and Carol—were fat, too, and every time I turned around, there they were, my chubby sophomore groupies. I guess I was proving to them that you could be chubby and popular at the same time. So I got to know them, and was friendly with them, but there’s a big difference between sophomores and seniors in high school.”

Dana and her family had moved to Washington State from one of the southern states where they had a little farm. Maryann went home with Dana once in a while and she could see that the Browns were totally into country-western music. “Her dad, who was a lot older than her mother, played the fiddle and Dana played the guitar. They belonged to some group called Country Fiddlers or something like that, and they used to play songs on the radio sometimes, and go to hoedowns, or whatever, where the fiddlers competed.”

After she graduated from Mount Tahoma, Maryann Hepburn went to business school in downtown Seattle, and lost touch with Dana. “I met my husband on a blind date, and he was from Miami, so we moved there for a while,” she said. “I hated everything about it. It was flat and hot and humid. I was so glad to get back to Washington. It was a little after that when Dana called me.”

Dana said she was married now and was calling to tell Maryann that she had just had a baby boy: Chad.* “He was way, way premature,” Dana said, “and I had to have an emergency C-section because he wasn’t breathing right or his heart was too slow, or something like that.”

Chad was in Children’s Orthopedic Hospital in Seattle in an incubator, and Dana said she had no transportation to visit him. Her husband was working nights, and they had only one car. Maryann, who had had a baby girl herself six months earlier, felt sorry for Dana and volunteered to drive her.

As Dana led her toward the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nursery, she warned her friend, “He’s a little small.”

“He was so small,” Maryann remembered, “I don’t think he weighed even two pounds. I’d never seen a baby so tiny. It was a miracle that he lived at all.”

But Chad did live, and he finally weighed enough so that his parents could take him home. Maryann and Dana, reunited, found they had a lot more in common than they had in high school. Their husbands worked for companies that were practically next door to each other, and they were outdoor guys who liked to cut wood together or fish while the wives visited.

Maryann was never sure just when Dana married her husband, but she knew that she was his second wife. She had the impression that they got married after Dana became pregnant, but it didn’t matter because they seemed happy together. “I liked him,” Maryann said. “His eyes twinkled and he had a great smile. What is the word? Charismatic. He was charismatic. He really wanted people to like him—so much so that he went out of his way to charm them. He was the kind of guy who would stop and help if your car broke down beside the road, always anxious to lend a hand. Dana was the same way, wanting friends.”

It seemed to Maryann that Dana’s husband made jokes about things most people wanted to hide. He turned his defeats into funny stories. She always remembered standing next to him in his backyard in Maple Valley Heights when he laughed and said, “Well, I married a thin blonde and that didn’t work out, so this time I married a fat brunette to change my luck.”

The two couples often got together on weekends for potluck dinners. None of them had much money, so they ate a lot of spaghetti and hamburger casseroles. They didn’t drink much either, but they sometimes had a glass of cheap wine. The women would laugh and say they got along so well because they were both overweight and had such skinny husbands. What had hurt so much in high school didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The two couples went to church together, too. There was a minister who was trying to start a new Southern Baptist congregation, and he was a dynamic speaker and ambitious proselytizer, knocking on doors to bring new worshippers into his church. There was no actual church building yet, so they held their Sunday and Wednesday services in the Aqua Barn, a compound in Maple Valley that featured both a swimming pool and a stable that rented horses.

Dana’s husband often stood to read the scriptures aloud to the congregation. “He was so skinny,” Maryann Hepburn recalled. “He had his hair combed down over his forehead and he looked like a boy wearing a man’s suit, but he was very serious in church.”

Their pastor’s views were truly archaic in a world where women’s rights were beginning to emerge. He preached that wives and daughters would be barred from Heaven if they didn’t obey their husbands. They were not allowed to wear the color red, or to cut their long hair. “Women were nothing in his eyes,” Maryann said. “We were not allowed to teach Sunday school or be choir directors or do any job where we had any authority. Dana’s husband believed everything that Pastor said, but my husband took issue with it. When Pastor told us that we were ‘Sunday Morning Christians’ because we didn’t go to every function they offered, that was pretty much the end for us.”

Dana’s husband, however, followed the minister’s edicts absolutely, and she didn’t seem to mind. She did what he said. He and Dana had moved to a little house in Burien, and they were fixing it up. Dana chose a pretty shade of blue to paint the bathroom, but he forbade it. “It’s going to be white,” he said firmly. “Everything in here has to be white.”

And it was.

Dana’s mother-in-law was almost her exact opposite. Mary was a salesperson in the Men’s Department at the JCPenney store in Renton. She was a brunette in her late forties and always impeccably dressed with perfect accessories. Friends described her as “very well put together.” She took great pride in her managerial position in the JCPenney hierarchy.

Dana’s mother-in-law bought all of her husband’s clothes, just as she did for her sons. She always knew ahead of time about Penney’s sales and also used her employee discount. Although it rankled Dana, it only made sense for Mary to buy her husband’s clothing.

Mary didn’t approve of Dana, either. Her housekeeping wasn’t up to Mary’s standards, and she felt her daughter-in-law didn’t take very good care of Chad. He was a frail boy with reddish blond hair who always seemed to have a runny nose. He had inherited his father’s allergies and had to take medication for that, and he was so full of energy that he never put on any fat.

Dana wanted to have another baby, but her husband didn’t. As much as he loved Chad, he didn’t think they could afford to raise two children. He wanted Dana to have her tubes tied.

As the years passed Dana gained even more weight and she was miserable about that. Her husband didn’t complain much, but she knew he would like her to be slimmer. Finally, she broached the subject of having gastric bypass surgery. In the late seventies, it was a new procedure, almost experimental. But Dana wanted it, and finally he encouraged her to go ahead with the operation.

The gastric surgery worked spectacularly well—maybe too well. Within months, Dana went from plus sizes to a size 7. She had never worn clothes that small. She suddenly became a very attractive woman and men did double takes when they saw her. It made her husband a little nervous. He had never worried that she would leave him, but now she had a lot of men noticing her. “Guys started to come on to Dana,” Maryann said, “and she’d never had that happen before.

“Dana was working in Penney’s, too. Her mother-in-law got her the job. Even though they had their issues, Dana and her husband were always over there, visiting, and her mother-in-law babysat for Chad a lot.”

By this time Dana and her family had moved again. They had lived in three or four houses in the south end of King County, while the Hepburns stayed put. Their new place was on Star Lake Road. Like the Maple Valley Heights house, it was in a very secluded area, down at the dead end of a road.

During one of their shared meals—at the house on Star Lake Road—their hosts disappeared after dinner, leaving Maryann and her husband, Gil, in the house with the children. Their guests cleared the table and waited. It was quite a while before Dana walked in with a funny grin on her face. She pulled Maryann inside and whispered, “Bet you can’t guess what we just did?”

When her friend looked mystified, Dana laughed and told her that she and her husband had gone outside and made love—he liked it that way. Maryann thought privately that it wasn’t a very polite thing for the host and hostess to do, but she let it go. Dana was so happy with her new figure that she seemed years younger than she was, almost like she was having a delayed teenage time.

Both couples enjoyed country-western music and liked to go to a spot called The Beanery on the East Valley Highway near Kent. When Dana’s husband had to work nights, Gil Hepburn would drive Maryann, Dana, and a mutual friend, Diane, to the country-western bar.

“That’s when things started to go downhill in Dana’s marriage,” Maryann said. “Gil would dance with all three of us, and we had a good time at first. But then Dana started slipping out the back with some guy. She always told her husband that she was staying overnight at Diane’s house because it was too late to come home alone while he was working.”

It blew up when Dana’s husband called Diane’s house one night, asking for his wife. Told she wasn’t there—that she had never spent the night at Diane’s house—he was stunned. His comfortable, overweight wife who had done what Pastor ordained and wanted only to keep house and be a mother had turned into a femme fatale. When her baffled husband questioned her, Dana said that Diane was lying, that it was Gil who was cheating on Maryann, and they were all trying to cover it up. Dana also spent time at the Eagles’ Lodge, often coming home well after 2 AM, worrying her husband more.

By this time, Dana’s gastric bypass was working more than it was meant to. She wasn’t getting enough nutrients to survive and her weight plummeted. She had no choice but to have her alimentary canal reconnected. If she didn’t, she would die. Now her husband insisted that she have her tubes tied while she was under the anesthesia and she agreed. One child was enough.

But the marriage was destroyed. The man who had never fit in anywhere now had two wives who had betrayed him, and he couldn’t forgive either one of them. By the spring of 1981, their divorce was final. He would pay Dana child support, and have custody of Chad on weekends and some vacations. He resented giving Dana his hard-earned money. It made him furious.

He had come up in the world in his jobs and in buying more and more expensive houses, but he kept striking out with women. Prostitutes were easier than trying to pick up women and ask them for dates.

28

FROM THE BEGINNING of his stint as the Green River Task Force commander, Captain Frank Adamson acknowledged that he wasn’t a veteran homicide investigator. If there were people who could enhance the task force’s effectiveness with their expertise, he wanted to invite them on board. Bob Keppel was borrowed back from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Keppel, with his “Ted” Task Force experience and his ability to organize diverse information, could be both an important expediter and a somewhat cold critic. So be it.

The F.B.I. sent Gerald “Duke” Dietrich, who was a humorous and deceptively easygoing special agent in the San Francisco office of the Bureau. Dietrich was an expert on child abductions and homicide. He had once actually wired a tombstone with a tape recorder to trap the sexual ravings of a necrophile. He and his former partner, Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, had an enviable record of crime solving in California.

Adamson also contacted Chuck Wright, a Washington State Probation and Parole supervisor. Wright taught courses at Seattle University on violent offenders and sexual deviancy. Adamson was looking for someone inside the probation system who would be able to quickly evaluate suspects—who were now euphemistically called, “persons of interest.” Many of the men the task force was looking at had prior records. Wright’s background would be of tremendous help in searching the system for sexual offenders, and he could work with Adamson and Dr. Chris Harris, a forensic psychiatrist, as one more mind to try to understand the killer they were looking for.

Sheriff Vern Thomas asked Amos Reed, then head of the Department of Corrections, if the task force could “borrow” Chuck Wright to act as a liaison. Reed said, “Of course.”

“The first thing I saw on Frank Adamson’s bookshelf was the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” Wright remembered. “I had never seen a police officer who had that ‘cookbook’ to use as a tool—and not only did Adamson have it, he’d read it. We were both readers and we hit it off right away.”

Wright was allowed into the back room of the task force headquarters where the “body map” was kept, covered with a tarp so that no reporter might accidentally see it. “The map was punctured with an overwhelming number of colored pins. Each pin represented a body, and these seemingly endless colored beads took me aback. How could there be so many bodies and we normal citizens not even know this?”

Every body site had been videotaped. At first there had been sound on the tapes, but the officers who had to deal with the horrors they found often swore or used four-letter words to defuse their own feelings. Wright suggested, “We have to think there may be a jury one day who will see these tapes, and listen to your profanity, and that won’t help the prosecution.

“The sound was turned off,” he recalled.

Chuck Wright saw how difficult it was to know what was evidence and what had simply been thrown away in trash piles: women’s underwear, cigarette butts, beer cans. To be safe, they took it all.

Despite the things he had seen during his many years as a probation officer, Wright had a number of unique experiences as he worked with the task force. As a winter sun set one night, he accompanied two plainclothes investigators into woods that grew darker with every step as the trees closed behind them. There had been a report that two bodies were hidden there. “It was pitch-black,” he recalled, “and I asked, ‘Aren’t you guys scared?’ and they whispered, ‘No,’ but when I turned around with my flashlight, I saw they both had their guns drawn—just in case.”

They walked a little farther into the “black hole.” “I took one more step and felt my foot go through some soft material, and my ankle and lower leg got wet with some warm liquid,” Wright said. “My heart stopped and my mind raced. I swore, too, ‘Oh shit! I just sank my foot into a body.’ But it was only a rotten log.”

One thing that impressed Wright was how concerned the King County officers were for the women on the street. “We parked on the SeaTac Strip, and we noticed a van pulling up ahead of us. The driver motioned to a young woman, and she walked over to the driver’s window so they could talk. In no time at all, she walked around and got into the passenger side, but before she did, she looked back and smiled at us. I was surprised, but the officer I was with just smiled back at her. When the van started up, so did our undercover car. We followed the van, staying well back, and stopped when it stopped. The deputy with me explained that they tried to watch johns and their dates to be sure the women were safe.

“After they finished, we followed the van back to the highway. When the girl got out, she looked back at us and we could tell by her body language that she was okay. At least for that moment in time, that girl was safe.”

The Pro-Active Team was developing rapport with the working girls as well as protecting them, and when they needed information about one of the men who picked them up, the women gave it. While the missing girls were very young and inexperienced for the most part, some prostitutes were streetwise and had learned to deal with the kinky demands of certain customers, including bondage and discipline, “water sports,” and necrophilia.

One aspect of necrophilia astonished Chuck Wright, who thought he had covered almost every perversion in the class he taught on sexual deviancy. Since they were investigating murders, the task force detectives talked to prostitutes who were willing to fulfill the truly grotesque fantasies of men who wanted to have sex with dead women. One “specialist” said she provided a room with a coffin, flickering candles, and mournful organ music. She powdered herself until she was as pale as milk, and actually inserted ice cubes into her vagina so she would seem to be a truly cold woman, the opposite of what most men might want. She said she made $500 for such a specialized performance.

Seattle police raided an escort service and arrested two men for promoting prostitution. In the evidence seized, they found index cards with the names, addresses, business connections, and personal preferences of their clients. Although most of that information would never be released, the list was culled for clients marked “dangerous,” and those with violent preferences were turned over to the Green River Task Force.

Such johns were added to the “persons of interest” list, and a few so-called respected citizens were shocked to be contacted by the detectives about their deepest secrets. But none of them could be linked to the Green River murders.

The women who made top dollar were the exception, of course. Wright remembered interviews with some of the families of the girls who had disappeared, many of them memorable because of the complete apathy he saw. “I was with two deputies who were trying to verify if a young teenage girl was ‘just’ missing or if she really was a Green River Killer victim,” he said. “When her father answered our knock, we walked into a house that was so messy that none of us sat down. The place was littered with beer cans, and cigarette smoke filled the room to the point that my eyes started to water. When one of the deputies asked him about his missing daughter, the man was very nonchalant. He said he had no idea where she was. When the deputy noted that she had been gone for over two months according to the report, the guy said he was surprised by the news. But he didn’t really seem surprised. Apparently, he was used to her not being around; he said he usually didn’t know where she was. She had ‘run off’ so often that he had just stopped being concerned about her whereabouts or welfare.

“When we got back in the squad car, we could only shake our heads. How could any father not know or even care about his daughter? Her case just had sadness built into it. We found out later that she was working the streets somewhere in California. At least she was alive and maybe in a better place than if she’d been in her dad’s household.”

Wright got to know the members of the task force well. He could see that some were “sprinters” who wanted to catch an infamous serial killer and do it now. “Others were highly trained long-distance runners—and that’s what Adamson needed, because it was clear it would be a long haul.”

No one could have known just how long.

Probably the most distinguished adviser to come on board the task force was Pierce Brooks. He was, of course, the investigative genius in America on serial murder. Although he already had his hands full launching VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, working with the F.B.I. in Quantico, and he was officially retired from law enforcement, Brooks had yet to slow down. He was in his early sixties and his health wasn’t the best; he had undergone delicate arterial surgery, and he would have dearly loved to spend his time with his wife, Joyce, in his home on the MacKenzie River east of Eugene, Oregon. Instead, he was constantly flying between Eugene; Quantico; Huntsville, Texas; and Seattle.

Brooks and I worked together on the VICAP task force, and, along with John Walsh, we had testified on the threat of serial murder in America at a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing in early 1983. Senators Arlen Spector and Ted Kennedy were two members of the committee who seemed to agree with what we had to say.

Now Brooks came to Seattle to evaluate the ongoing Green River investigation. He spent two weeks perusing the staggering amount of information gathered thus far by the first two task forces. His recommendation was that the investigation must continue, with as large a team as possible. If catching this killer meant doubling the manpower, then it should be done. Every public record, F.I.R., tip, clue, or possible bit of information had to be gathered and fed into the computer system they had.

Going back to the first serial killer he himself ever hunted, albeit in a time when even he didn’t use the term, Brooks thought of Harvey Glatman, the so-called Lonely Hearts Killer. Glatman was a homely man with big ears who lived in a cheap apartment in Los Angeles. He didn’t appeal to the women he met through a Lonely Hearts club, and he’d killed one who rejected his advance and only wanted to go home. After that, he had lured victims in Los Angeles by pretending to be a professional photographer. He took photos of his naive victims, some where they were tied up and gagged, telling them he was shooting covers for fact-detective magazines. But then he drove the helpless young women to the desert where he strangled them, lingering afterward to shoot more pictures.

Glatman had taught Pierce Brooks a lot about murderers like the Green River Killer. “I don’t believe this killer selected the body disposal sites at random,” Brooks told Vern Thomas, Frank Adamson, and Bob Keppel. “If he did, he is the luckiest serial murderer of all time. He knows pretty well, or even exactly, where he will dispose of the victims before the murders occur.

“Just for the moment, let’s focus on four of the most prominent cluster sites: airport north, airport south, Star Lake, and the Green River. They are heavily wooded, somewhat concealed, and you think at first that this is an ideal location where someone would take anything to hide it—a body in this particular case—anything valuable. In this case, it was the body that was valuable.”

Brooks knew what he was talking about. He explained that the bodies of the victims, and the killer’s relationship to them, was what gave him power. He needed the secrecy and the knowledge that only he knew where the poor dead girls waited for him.

“It is a very high risk situation,” he continued, “to go into an unknown area that is heavily wooded without knowing something about the location. I just do not believe that the killer went there with his victim the first time he had ever been there. I try to put myself in his position. Here I am a stranger in the area. If I want to dispose of a body and I’m driving down a nice, little winding hill and I have this body I want to get rid of, that would probably be the last place I would stop.”

A stranger wouldn’t know what was at the bottom of the hill, who might be approaching, or, in the case of an illegal trash dumping spot, if someone might drive up and catch him. No, he would have to be very familiar with where he went with a body. The Green River site—the first site—would have been especially iffy for someone unfamiliar with it. There were the fishermen along its banks, and local residents taking a shortcut home.

Brooks was positive that the killer either lived or worked nearby. He knew that stretch of river like he knew the back of his hand. He urged the task force detectives to learn who lived there, worked near there on a permanent basis, had worked there on a temporary project. Since the Green River victims had disappeared at various times of day and night, he suggested they check unions for work schedules, cab companies for their drivers’ locations and shifts, military records from the many bases around Seattle and Tacoma.