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: 18 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

“I have always felt this person might either be in the military or have been in the military,” Brooks said. More than any psychic, and most detectives and F.B.I. special agents, Brooks could draw a picture in his mind, a profile of the serial killer they all hunted. He was quite sure that it was only one killer, working alone.

“The odds are that it would be a Caucasian—good chance that he is military, or had a military connection, is an outdoors type, is somewhat of a loner but is certainly not a total introvert. I can’t believe that a person that picks up prostitutes on the street is the kind of person who walks into some kind of singles bar and tries to make it with some of the girls. I think this fella’s a little bit backward that way, does not come on strong—that’s why he goes for prostitutes, which, in my thinking, are the easiest victims.”

Brooks speculated that the GRK might be a trained killer, taught that arcane skill in the service. “In other words, he could be a trained survivalist, knows how to kill and kill quickly. He is not a mutilator, has no interest in that. His sexual gratification is just with the kill.”

Two men working together? Brooks said it was possible. It had happened before. Two men would explain how heavy bodies could have been carried so far up and down hills and into deep woods.

Even in the most organized investigation, Brooks pointed out that most of the serial killers captured were caught on a fluke. They had been stopped because of a traffic violation or because their cars had some defective equipment, and only then had patrol officers done Wants and Warrants checks and realized they had hooked a very big fish.

Frank Adamson and his team didn’t care how they caught the GRK, just so long as they did.

29

IN THE SPRING OF 1984, the reports of missing women slowed to a trickle and then seemed to stop completely. There was the cautious sense that perhaps the Green River Killer’s torrent of murder was over. Now, the thrust of the probe changed. It was as if he had divided his contest with detectives into two parts: the murder phase and the body recovery phase. Up until mid-March, the task force had found only fourteen of the missing.

In February and March, a new cluster site surfaced, and an earlier disposal area yielded another body fragment. On February 19, a partial human jawbone was discovered in the Mountain View Cemetery in Auburn, near where Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found. It was not immediately tied to the identity of any of the victims.

On March 31, 1984, a man and his son were hiking when they came across the skeletal remains of a female in an entirely new location, far from the airport and Star Lake. This site was on Highway 410, twelve miles east of the town of Enumclaw and about thirty miles southeast of the SeaTac Strip. The topography and vegetation along 410, however, were typical of lightly populated areas in western Washington: fir forests, thick underbrush, isolated. Ironically, the White River coursed nearby.

The connection to the Green River investigation seemed remote to Frank Adamson. It was so far from the places where other victims had been left, and animals had dragged away most of the bones. There weren’t even enough to make a positive identification. Every body found in Washington’s forests couldn’t be a GRK victim. Still, the bones were saved, and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts would be brought in to sweep the area for additional evidence.

More surprising were the discoveries east of Seattle. The newest site was located on the way to Snoqualmie Pass, the mountain summit where fifteen-year-old Carrie Rois had been taken by the stranger in the truck. But Carrie, missing now, had come back safely from that trip. On Valentine’s Day, an army private who was part of a convoy to the Yakima Firing Range was using a rest stop in a heavily treed area when he came across a skeleton. It rested below a cliff at the base of Mount Washington. The site was close to Change Creek, a few miles east of the hamlet of North Bend off Exit 38 on the I-90 Freeway. I-90 connected Seattle and the coast to eastern Washington. Sheriff’s personnel and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts combed the area, also known as Homestead Valley Road, for anything that might help identify the female skeleton.

Bill Haglund, chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, tried to match the Valentine’s Day victim’s distinctive teeth, which had a wide gap between two upper front teeth, to the dental charts the M.E.’s office had on file without success.

She was to be known simply as Bones #8. Medical examiner Dr. Don Reay determined that the woman, who had brown hair, was Caucasian, and in her late twenties or early thirties. Her arms and her lower leg bones were missing, probably dragged off by animals. Reay estimated that she had been of medium height. She had been dead for three to six months.

That was all the information Reay released. He was trying, as everyone on the task force was, to hold back as much information as possible to eliminate compulsive confessors. The less specific information the general public knew, the better, although they also had to be warned of the danger. It was a double-edged sword.

A month later, on March 13, 1984, another skeleton surfaced three hundred yards away, her hands and part of one arm missing. A man looking for moss to sell to florists stumbled upon it. Again, searchers swarmed over the area, combing the underbrush in a one-mile section on either side of a now little-used stretch of old I-90. They found a pair of women’s panties in the general region, but they couldn’t be sure they were connected to the skeleton, which had lain there for from two to four months.

Bill Haglund was able to identify this second woman. It was Lisa Lorraine Yates—Lisa, who had promised her niece she would come to take her on a picnic soon. She had been one of the last girls to vanish—two days before Christmas, three months before her remains were found.

This site in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains was quite a way away from both the SeaTac Strip and Aurora Avenue North. Mount Si (also known as “Twin Peaks” after the popular television series) rose like a behemoth with fir forests climbing to glistening white snowbanks at the peaks’ very tops. Nearby, the new freeway buzzed with traffic, much of it made up of huge trucks, rigs from all over the United States. Most drivers pulled off at Exit 34 for a hearty meal at Ken’s Truck Stop, where they could take a shower, check into a motel, or even doze in the sleeper sections of their cabs. Ken’s was a trucker’s paradise, and the food was so good that most regular travelers stopped there, too. Camp Waskowitz, where fifth and sixth grade students from Highline public schools camped, was also close by.

What if the Green River Killer was a long-haul trucker? He wouldn’t be the first serial killer who was, an ideal job for a man who wanted to avoid detection by ridding himself of his victims in isolated areas. That was one of the suggestions the anonymous letter writer had sent to Mike Barber of the P.I.

The new cluster opened up more possibilities. Frank Adamson ordered a thorough and tedious search between the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River and the very steep ridge that lay to the south. The searchers gleaned nothing of interest.

There were two easy ways to reach the North Bend site. One was by going east on I-90 from Seattle, across the first Floating Bridge, and the other was by traveling northeasterly along Highway 18, a much more isolated stretch of road that formed the hypotenuse of a triangle of roads from just north of Tacoma to Auburn, Kent, and Maple Valley, ending a few miles west of North Bend. It was mostly a two-lane road with some passing lanes and turnouts, and forests creeping almost up to the road itself. The two newly discovered bodies were at the eastern terminus of Highway 18. Was there a geographical “plan” in a stealthy killer’s mind? Would there be more body cluster sites that might hook up to form a pattern? Only time would tell.

SEVERAL BODIES had been found south of the SeaTac Airport, and also just north of the runways. The next discoveries were also north of the airport, and closer to the ground zero corner of the Pac HiWay and S. 144th.

It was the first day of spring, March 21, 1984. Cindy Smith had just gone missing in Seattle, although her disappearance hadn’t been reported yet. Bob Van Dyke, the caretaker of three baseball fields at 16th Avenue South and S. 146th, was clearing brush in preparation for the upcoming season when his Labrador retriever came running up to him with a bone in his mouth.

“I knew what it was, but I hoped that it wasn’t,” Van Dyke said.

It was a human hip bone. Van Dyke called the Port of Seattle Police because the baseball fields were in their jurisdiction, and they called the Green River Task Force. Lieutenant Jackson Beard was at the scene as soon as he could gather detectives and Explorer scouts. A necrosearch dog led them first to a copse of pine trees one hundred feet beyond one field’s fence. There was a human skeleton there. It was that of a young female, and she was destined to be Bones #10.

The search that followed was the largest so far in the Green River investigation; sixty Explorer scouts walked shoulder to shoulder over several square blocks. Lieutenant Danny Nolan joined Beard to coordinate the searchers’ efforts.

The next day, Chris Clifford, a dog handler, and his blood-hound—appropriately named Sorrow—located another body in the same area. Sorrow was an enthusiastic search dog who was more skilled at necrosearch than at finding living people. Dogs trained to find people seem to be good at either live searches or dead searches but not both—a trait that can be easily determined when they are only puppies. Discovering a corpse wasn’t a victory for either Clifford or Sorrow, however.

“These hunts are real depressing,” Clifford said. “And not very rewarding. Sorrow had this funny reaction, too. Like ‘Hey, this isn’t fun.’ When he finds something that’s dead, he gets real tentative. He just stops. I came around the corner and saw him just standing there, frozen.”

Sorrow had found Cheryl Lee Wims, eighteen, missing from downtown Seattle for exactly ten months to the day.

AS SAD AS the body discoveries were, Captain Frank Adamson’s task force felt they were closing in on the man who had destroyed lives so heedlessly. Surely, with the recovery of eighteen victims’ remains, something was going to break. As the investigators searched the area slightly west of the airport, they felt they were only hours from finding some piece of physical evidence that would lead them to him.

And yet, as I write this, it is exactly twenty years later. Twenty years, and I never write a book until a case, or a series of cases, has been adjudicated. Never has there been a homicidal mystery that had so many dead ends and mazes.

The headlines in the newspaper clippings I have saved about the discoveries of March 1984 are ironic, given the precipitous plunge of Howard Dean as a Democratic shoo-in in March 2004. It was an election year two decades ago, too, and the political commentators were just as anxious to jump to conclusions about the coming election, even though they knew that much in life can change so rapidly: “No Doubt Now: Hart is the Man to Beat—Gary Hart is the obvious leader for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination!” (United Press International).

Despite their high hopes, Howard Dean’s and Gary Hart’s nominations were not to be, and neither was the imminent capture of the Green River Killer.

30

THE TASK FORCE had now looked at, and cleared, thousands of suspects: all of the A’s, B’s, and many of the C’s. They had concluded that there was no shortage of dangerous, or peculiar, men in south King County in 1984.

A Kent motel manager named Douglas Jeffrey had a criminal record stemming from a rape conviction thirteen years earlier that his employers didn’t even know about. A good-looking man with a wife and child, he had a great smile and a winning manner. It was the philosophy of the seventies and early eighties that sex offenders could be treated at Western State Hospital, rehabilitated, and released into society without using drastic measures like chemical or surgical castration.

Jeffrey, with his apparently stable family life, seemed to be a natural for rehab. He had been declared a treatable sexual psychopath and sent to the mental hospital rather than to prison. He participated in the approved treatment in the sexual offenders program: group therapy.

However, when Jeffrey was released and deemed a responsible citizen, he set about proving that group therapy had done little, if anything, to change his deeply ingrained patterns. It had only whetted his appetite. For more than two years, he entered apartments and houses in the East Hill section of Kent. Women woke up in the wee hours of the morning to find a man looming over their beds with a nylon stocking pulled over his face, making a grotesque mask that hid his real features. Some estimates placed his toll at over one hundred rapes. He used a knife to threaten the already terrified women into submission, and afterward he asked for their money and jewelry.

Sometimes he carried a camera with a time-release shutter so he could take pictures of himself and his victims during his sexual attacks. He also had a beeper to alert him when he was needed back at the motel where he worked.

Finally captured, Jeffrey pleaded guilty to seventeen counts of rape, burglary, and kidnapping in King County Superior Court. Becky Roe, long head of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Sexual Assault Unit, recommended that he receive two consecutive life sentences. “I don’t think violent sex offenders are treatable,” she said succinctly.

Douglas Jeffrey had prowled in the town where the first Green River victims were found. He had the kind of benign look about him that would have made young women trust him. Could he be a killer as well as a relentless rapist? Possibly, but he was eventually dropped as a Green River suspect.

In the summer of 1983, a nineteen-year-old man, enlisted a friend, twenty, to help him kill his own mother. The woman, thirty-nine, was choked to death in the back of the battered van they lived in. Her son later admitted to detectives that they had also killed four women in the south part of King County, and he even described areas where they had left their bodies. He said he hated women, beginning with his mother. But then he recanted his confessions about murdering teenage girls. Both men were sentenced to long prison terms, and subsequently removed from the Green River possibles.

It was very difficult not to be enthusiastic about suspects who seemed a perfect fit. I fell into that trap myself any number of times. A few years into the Green River investigation, I received several letters from a man who lived in Washington, D.C. He was an attorney there. I verified that. He hinted that he had the answers to what had happened to all the murdered women, and he said he would send me tapes that would convince me.

But then he told me that he had played a large part in the Watergate scandal and that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward depended upon him for information. Upon hearing that, I began to doubt his veracity, if not his sanity. It was too pat.

When the tapes arrived, they consisted of hour after hour of my tipster’s personal witnessing of an arcane cult that he said abducted women from the trick sites so they could be sacrificed. He had hidden in the shadows, he said, as he watched hooded people strangling young women in the light of a huge bonfire. The area he described was similar to the woods where many of the victims’ remains had been found, but woods and forests could be found in any direction beyond the Seattle city limits. My “expert” knew many of the victims’ names, and their physical descriptions were correct, but that information had been in the newspapers. He was so obsessed that I felt he had gone from his “Watergate” fantasy to a “Green River” fantasy.

And then I bought a copy of All the President’s Men, and, sure enough, my correspondent had been a key player in the authors’ contacts with Deep Throat. The man’s name was unusual, and I was able to validate that he was who he said he was, that he lived where he said he did—in a Washington suburb—and that he currently held a position of some responsibility. I supposed he might be telling the truth about both newsworthy investigations, but I was more inclined to think that Watergate had unhinged him.

Just to be sure I wasn’t looking away from truly important information, I took the “cult sacrifice tapes” to Dave Reichert and told him what I knew about the man who sent them. I let the informant know that his revelations were now in the proper hands, which he approved. And then I moved on. If the information was good, Reichert would deal with it. I never heard back from him. If he didn’t have time to listen to hours and hours of someone rambling on about cults and human sacrifice, I can’t say I blamed him.

One of my more insistent callers was a woman who lived in the south county area. She was certain that her estranged husband was the Green River Killer. I had heard from scores of women who were under the same impression about their ex-husbands, but this woman was relentless. Although it wasn’t generally known, Marie Malvar’s driver’s license had been found at the SeaTac Airport weeks after she disappeared. Either she had lost it there herself, her purse had been stolen, or her abductor had wanted to make it look as though she had willingly flown away from her boyfriend and family.

The woman who called, named Sonya,* was fixated on the Green River cases, just as she was convinced that a major American retail corporation was spying on her. The latter seemed to me to be a paranoid delusion. In the Green River cases, she was particularly focused on Marie Malvar. That, too, could be part of a fantasy world. She was so frightened that she moved constantly, leaving me a different phone number every time she called.

“I went with my husband to the airport to see his mother and father off at the B gates,” Sonya said breathlessly. “My husband pulled some cards out of what I thought was my wallet. I grabbed what I thought was my driver’s license, but when I looked at it, it wasn’t mine. There was a picture of a girl in her twenties with long dark hair. It had four names on it, but all I could see was the last name that started out ‘Mal’ before he snatched it back. He gave it to our baby to play with, but after his folks left, he reached for it and realized that the baby had dropped it. He was frantic looking for it on the floor, but they told us we had to leave the terminal because they were locking the doors.”

Marie’s license had been found near Gate B-4 at the airport by Michael Meadows, a maintenance worker for American Building Maintenance (ABM) while he was vacuuming on May 27, 1983, and he turned it in to Lost and Found, who then gave it to the Green River Task Force. But Sonya insisted that the airport had lost it and the task force didn’t know about it. Eventually, she went on the Internet and hooked up with a self-styled female private eye in Texas who had also logged on to a chat room where the Green River murders were discussed constantly.

It was the kind of case that attracted wannabe detectives. Everyone in Seattle seemed to have a theory, but the prevailing rumor was still the one that said the Green River Killer was a cop. Four of the names people gave me as “absolutely, surely, the GRK” were detectives I had known for years. After a while, if I thought about it enough, I could almost begin to wonder if I had ever really known them.

They had ex-wives, too, and two different women called about two different cops they’d been married to once. One even said coyly, “Ann, you know him. You’ve had lunch with him.”

That was a little creepy, but I’d had lunch with hundreds of detectives over the years. I hated the guessing games, and I was grateful when the officers’ names were cleared.

No forensic technique was considered too strange to try in the search to identify either the victims or the killer himself. Some of the detectives were open to listening to psychics. Dowsers (who seek water in the ground with a forked stick) were encouraged to try to locate bodies, and a number of informants had been hypnotized to see if their unconscious minds would bring forth more specific information.

Betty Pat Gatliff was a forensic sculptor in Oklahoma. Along with a handful of forensic anthropologists and artists, Betty Pat’s forte was to put faces on skulls where there was no flesh left. It sounds like a grisly kind of artistry, and it wasn’t something I ever thought I could watch, much less do. I’d met Betty Pat once at a forensic science conference where I was presenting a seminar on Ted Bundy, and she called me when she came to Seattle. She invited me to join her at Dr. Don Reay’s medical examiner’s headquarters, which was then at Harborview, our county hospital facility. A little reluctantly, I accepted. At the M.E.’s office, I looked at the four boxes that held the numbered bones of the unknown victims as she selected a skull. I reminded myself that these bones had once been young women who deserved to have their identity known and to have funeral services and a decent burial or cremation.

Betty Pat began with the skull from the remains found in September 1983, beside the Star Lake Road. It had been steam cleaned and sterilized. Trying to see it through Betty Pat’s eyes, I realized that all skulls don’t look alike. There were many individual characteristics. The high cheekbones on this one suggested an American Indian heritage.

Betty Pat showed me how she attached erasers from ordinary pencils to the face portion. She’d found that thickness matched the skin and underlying tissue of most subjects. Then she began to add claylike “flesh” to bring out the features. Of course, if the person had been very fat or very thin, this method might not be accurate, but there was no way to tell because we didn’t know whose face we were trying to bring back.

Carefully patting on clay, Betty Pat filled in the space between the erasers, and someone’s face did emerge. When she was satisfied, she added dark brown glass eyes, eyebrows, and a dark wig.

We stood back, wondering. Who are you?

But this was not an infallible means of identification. It’s impossible to know how much soft tissue—lips or the tip of a nose—was once there. Gender and racial characteristics can usually be determined by jaws and foreheads and teeth, so it’s easier to know what color hair and eyes to add, but not always.

Had this woman plucked her eyebrows? What about makeup and the length of her hair? Was it straight or curly? Forensic artist Frank Bender of Philadelphia says he “talks” to the skulls he works on and gets a remarkable sense of who they were and what they looked like. Betty Pat Gatliff relied more on bone structure.

Although we didn’t know it then, we were working on Gail Mathews—whose lover had seen her riding in the old truck with a stranger, and she looked right through him. She must have been very frightened not to call for help. Her clay face was calm now, and inscrutable.

When I looked at a photograph of Gail later, I saw that she had inordinately large lips, as if she had overdone collagen injections. But they didn’t use collagen cosmetically in 1983; hers were naturally lush, so full that there would have been no way for us to recreate her real face.

Gail had not been the only victim left near the Star Lake Road. On March 31, 1984, six months after her remains were discovered there, a mushroom hunter moved through the shadowy trees along the ravine and came upon a human skull on the east side of the road. He backed out of the woods and called the King County Sheriff. Within a short time, Frank Adamson had gathered his crew of detectives and Explorer scouts. This was another very, very difficult region to search. The man who had left so many bodies seemed to prefer steep inclines, and this was one of the steepest. Maybe it was easier for him to roll his victims down the hill, away from prying eyes. If he was, indeed, the guy seen in several different trucks, he might even have had some kind of winch or step that helped him lower the victims from the back of his pickup. But his plan wasn’t perfect. The trees had caught the dead girls and kept them from plunging all the way down.

It was to be an endlessly weary day for Adamson, hampered as he was by reporters who kept trying to go into the woods and look for evidence or even more bodies. The last thing he needed was a bunch of media types messing up any evidence at this site.

It didn’t take long to find the remainder of the skeleton that went with the skull. But as the search progressed, the task force investigators discovered two more skeletons farther down the slope. And then more. Trees nearest each body site were sprayed with orange paint so that they had some kind of center point for triangulation measurements. Detectives marked the trees nearest to the remains: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

This would turn out to be one of the killer’s favorite places to rid himself of the women he no longer wanted. As the crow flies, it was less than a mile from the Green River, where the first five of his victims had been found.

The woods themselves, usually silent except for the distant rushing sound of Mill Creek at the bottom of the ravine, seemed quite remote. But the site was close to Pac HiWay, although 272nd was considerably south of where the Strip ended. To the east, Smith Brothers’ Dairy had dozens of milk trucks coming and going, and young families were building houses along 55th South and Star Lake Road. It would have been difficult for the killer to bring a body here in the daytime. After dark, it was possible that no one had ever seen him.

All weekend long, reporters lit on Adamson like mosquitos. At the time, he had no media spokesman to deflect questions, and everywhere he turned he stumbled over another reporter. He was a man who was seldom impatient or moody, but this was a bad two days. By the time he got back to task force headquarters, Cookie Hunt was waiting for him, having dogged his steps at Star Lake Road. “Cookie was so pushy,” Adamson said. “When I went back to my office, I had 128 phone calls and messages, and I had had it. I found her very antagonizing that day.”

He was exhausted. They all were. Officially, they now had twenty bodies. Adamson suspected that this was only the tip of the iceberg. When Dr. Don Reay and Bill Haglund let him know the identities of the latest victims located, it was clear that the killer was working with a kind of maniacal organization. As Pierce Brooks had suspected, the GRK obviously had his private dumping sites waiting before he went out to kill.

First, he’d used the Green River, and then the deserted blocks around the airport, then Highway 410 near Enumclaw and the mountain foothills off Highway 18, and finally Star Lake. There might be even more cluster sites.

The Star Lake Road victims were identified as Terry Rene Milligan, gone from the Strip on August 28, 1982—found on April 1, 1984; Delores Williams, missing from the Strip on March 8, 1983—found on March 31, 1984; Sandra Kay Gabbert, missing from the Strip on April 17, 1983—found on April 1, 1984.

(And when they finally identified Gail Mathews, they would realize that she was taken from Pac HiWay only five days after Sand-e Gabbert disappeared. Perhaps something had spooked the killer, and he had to drop Gail’s body too close to the road. That would explain why she was found first. But no one knew it was Gail until she was positively identified in February 1985, almost two years later.)

The fourth body found off Star Lake Road was identified in the third week of April by Bill Haglund in the medical examiner’s office, using dental records. She was Alma Ann Smith, the quiet, lonely girl who once went to seventh grade in Walla Walla. She had gone off to Seattle so many times because her father lived near there, bouncing from one parent to the other.

They did not find Marie Malvar or Keli Kay McGinness who had also disappeared in the spring of 1983.

THE GREEN RIVER MURDERER was becoming almost legendary, a fictional character not unlike Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street or Jason in the Friday the 13th series, current movies that teenagers flocked to watch as a cast of young actors fell victim to a stealthy killer who cuts them away from the crowd one by one and then murders them. But what was deliciously scary on the movie screen was bleak and ugly in real life.

If the killer was reading the newspapers and watching television—and the task force was almost positive he was—he was probably smiling; he was now being compared to John Gacy, Wayne Williams, and Ted Bundy in terms of body counts. And he was leading the pack.

Indeed, there were so many girls missing now, and so many who had been found, that I caught myself referring to them by their number in terms of the sequence of their disappearances. I was horrified when that dawned on me. I never wanted to do that again, so I stayed up all night with a large piece of construction paper, newspapers, scissors, and cellophane tape. I attached their pictures to the chart, and then wrote their names, descriptions, the date they went missing, and the date they had been found. Too many of them still had a blank space in the last category. But I had memorized their names and faces, and they would be forever imprinted on my mind as real human beings, not just numbers.

FRANK ADAMSON, the reader of poetry, knew T. S. Eliot’s work well, and he realized that April 1984 was, indeed, “the cruelest month,” at least in terms of the number of women’s bodies that were being discovered.