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: 24 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

Tikkenborg cruised in his truck at night and kept a red police bubble light in it. He also had displayed a pair of handcuffs and a police badge shaped like a star. He said he’d stolen it and a gun from a police car in Auburn. He often came to work after being out all night “trapping,” and both he and his truck had “a foul odor.”

The most bizarre thing Tikkenborg’s co-worker recalled, however, was the time Tikkenborg showed up with a mannequin he said he’d found in the woods. He kept it in his truck after that, covered with a tarp, and often slashed at it with his scalpels.

In November 1985, task force investigators had interviewed a Washington State Wildlife Control Agent who worked for the Department of Game. He recalled Barney Tikkenborg very well.

His trapping activity peaked between 1976 and 1981, but after that it had dropped off. During his most active years, Tikkenborg had run as many as 125 registered traplines. Moreover, he’d been one of only four trappers who frequented the Green River area during that time.

The wildlife agent said that Tikkenborg’s other trapping areas were around Enumclaw, North Bend, and the Seattle-Tacoma area. He was required by law to keep records on every animal he killed, and he was “a fanatical record keeper. His tally sheet for the 1979–1980 trapping season showed he’d killed 103 cats and seventy dogs.”

In 1978, the trapper was arrested on Mercer Island where trapping was illegal. He had once put homemade decals on the doors of his green Ford pickup truck apparently to create the impression that he was a wildlife agent. That gave him the chance to trap out of season. When the real agent talked to the task force detectives, he said that he had advised Tikkenborg that his animal skins were obtained out of season and would be seized by authorities, to which Tikkenborg had a surprising reaction: “He broke down and wept.”

Ever since Barney Tikkenborg’s name had leapt into the “A” category for the task force, detectives had located and interviewed people who had known of his activities, and a sickening image grew more and more detailed. His cruelty to animals and his preoccupation with sadism and death had been noted by many people.

In early January 1986, Frank Adamson read yet another report of an interview with an acquaintance of the trapper. It said he killed animals with an ice pick shoved into the spinal column at the base of the skull. This acquaintance also said that the trapper was obsessed with sex and was drawn to danger.

The Green River investigators learned that Tikkenborg had been a hyperactive child who ran around the neighborhood and had once come close to drowning. His mother, who had been divorced four times, chose an odd way to keep him indoors. She made him wear a dress. That had embarrassed him so much that he never went outside. According to a police officer who knew Tikkenborg, he had heard from one of the trapper’s siblings that his mother had once tried to kill him when he was a child because she didn’t want him.

Silently and carefully, task force officers and F.B.I. agents spread out to talk to a half dozen or more witnesses who knew Barney Tikkenborg. They would try to conduct concurrent interviews so the word that they were homing in on the trapper wouldn’t reach him or the media.

Another fur trapper recalled that Tikkenborg had taken him into the woods to show him trapping methods. He had watched as Tikkenborg pulled his set lines. He agreed to go with detectives into the areas where Tikkenborg had placed his traps. He wasn’t sure if he could find the exact spots again, but he said he would try. Tikkenborg had always used natural landmarks and milepost numbers along the roadways to locate his traps and he kept a loose-leaf notebook listing each trap’s position.

For the entire day of January 23, 1986, detectives traversed roads that were all too familiar. They went first to the Enumclaw area, coming within several miles of where the bodies of Debbie Abernathy, Mary Bello, and Martina Authorlee had been found. Their potential witness also took them to the Green River, to within four hundred yards of the spot where Wendy Lee Coffield’s body had been found floating. Next, they went to the Mountain View Cemetery, and to Star Lake Road where the informant said Tikkenborg had set his traps at both the bottom and the top of the ravine.

Finally, they went to areas near Jovita Road and Soos Creek, and the novice trapper pointed out the exact spot where Colleen Brockman, the girl with braces on her teeth, had been discovered. Yvonne Antosh’s remains had been left directly across the road.

Tikkenborg matched both John Douglas’s and John Kelly’s profiles more closely than any other suspect. The circumstantial evidence was piling up, and for the first time in many months, Frank Adamson felt excited that the long hunt might be over. That excitement increased when one of the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, who had come from a family familiar with trapping in his home state of Florida, explained about “drowning rocks.”

He said it wasn’t unusual for hunters or trappers to submerge their game in cold water to preserve it. To keep the carcasses below the surface of the water, logs and large rocks were placed on top of them. “Sometimes they place smaller rocks inside body cavities to be sure they don’t get carried downstream,” the agent said.

TIME was growing short. A reporter for a Seattle all-news radio station had been watching the Green River Task Force for months and had picked up the focus on Barney Tikkenborg. By following police units, he saw who they were following, and it was Tikkenborg, who was himself visiting the areas of some known body sites. When the reporter approached Adamson and asked why Tikkenborg was under such heavy surveillance, Adamson beseeched him not to break a story about the trapper. Yes, they were looking closely at him, but if it hit the media, the suspect would have an opportunity to get rid of evidence before the task force could obtain a search warrant.

The reporter said he would sit on the story, but only if Adamson let him have the first interview if they arrested Tikkenborg. Caught between a rock and a hard place and having, once more, to dodge the swarm of the hovering media, Adamson promised the reporter he would get the first word that an arrest had been made.

“I said arrest,” Adamson recalled, “and he took it that I would alert him before we served a search warrant. I never promised him that—I couldn’t. I wasn’t even sure when we’d get a search warrant. He called me and told me he was going out of town and asked if that was a good idea. I couldn’t tell him. As we got closer, the media was buzzing.”

The newscaster, sensing that something was about to come down, decided to stay in Seattle, just in case.

On February 6, F.B.I. special agents Duke Dietrich and Paul Lindsay, and task force detectives Matt Haney and Kevin O’Keefe set out early in the day to talk to Barney Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Back at Green River headquarters, Frank Adamson was writing an affidavit to obtain search warrants for Tikkenborg’s house, his mother’s house, his two pickup trucks, and another truck located at his mother-in-law’s house, which had been cut in two with an acetylene torch and then burned.

The specific items the task force searchers were looking for were women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry and purses, notebooks and other documentation of Tikkenborg’s trapping activities, weapons such as ice picks, knives, garrotes, scalpels and guns, newspaper clippings or photographs of the Green River victims, trace evidence like hair, fibers, blood or “particles,” latent fingerprints of the dead and missing women, and implements and solutions that would commonly be used to clean up the evidence of the crime of homicide. Adamson also listed control samples of carpeting, fabrics, and paint chips from various surfaces, floors, furniture, drapes, and clothing—all to be compared to fibers and particles found with the victims’ remains.

As it turned out, there was no need for a search warrant at the home of Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Mick and Ruthie Legassi* readily agreed to sign a Consent to Search form. They had no objection to detectives looking around their house. And they were quite willing to be interviewed. Paul Lindsay and Kevin O’Keefe interviewed Tikkenborg’s mother, while Dietrich and Haney talked to his stepfather.

Mick was Ruthie’s fourth husband, and he admitted that her son had resented his marrying Ruthie at first. Young Barney Tikkenborg had lived with his father until he was about fifteen. Subsequently, he lived with the Legassis and other relatives. He wasn’t the kind of person to show his feelings, except when he was talking about hunting and fishing, so his stepfather never knew if moving from one relative to another had bothered him.

Early on, Barney had gotten in trouble for stealing things, and he’d had a brush or two with the law over thefts and burglaries that he had told Legassi he committed for “the thrill of it.” He was tossed out of the service after he was convicted of theft from a footlocker in his barracks.

Initially, Barney Tikkenborg hadn’t had much luck with women. His first marriage lasted only a year, and he was “shook up” when his bride left him for another man. He’d gone off to Alaska to hunt and fish for a year, but when he came back, he married again—a Canadian girl. She was the daughter of his father’s current wife—not a half sister but a stepsister. When he got arrested for burglary again, she left him, too.

Tikkenborg made a third try at marriage. He had a daughter by that wife, and the three of them lived in the Seattle area where he worked as a cement finisher. But periodically, he would be arrested for burglary and have to serve time. His third wife left him while he was in prison.

Duke Dietrich worked hard to keep up with this very complicated family tree, convoluted because so many of them had had multiple marriages. In the late seventies, Tikkenborg’s stepfather said that Barney had dated a checker at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket located near the Jovita Canyon. She had grown up on a farm in Enumclaw, and while they did not marry, she did introduce Barney to his fourth, and current, wife. They had lived first inside the city limits of Kent, off 192nd Street. And they seemed to have had a good marriage. If Barney teased his wife by talking about other women, she came right back at him.

“They’re pretty much equals,” Legassi said. “She doesn’t take any shit off him.”

Tikkenborg’s stepfather didn’t recall that Barney had ever commented on prostitutes one way or the other. Yes, he’d mentioned the Green River murders once or twice, but only in passing. “One time he said that there was a screwball on the loose. We talked about it a little.”

The closest Tikkenborg had ever come to showing his feelings about loose women was when he had put a sticker on his truck that read “Good Girls Go to Heaven; Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” But that was only a joke.

Legassi said that Barney hadn’t seen anything wrong with his trapping activities, and he’d made good money at it—running three hundred traps at one time. “He said that we’d be overrun with them critters if nobody trapped them.” He recalled that Barney trapped muskrats, beavers, and bobcats in the deep woods, raccoons in the airport area, and coyotes near Enumclaw.

“How does he kill them?” Dietrich asked quietly.

“By sticking ice picks into the back of their brain or stepping on their chests,” Legassi said. He added that Barney had once used a small pistol, but had stopped that because it made too much noise. Yes, he knew that sometimes his stepson had shot dogs in the woods so they wouldn’t get into his traps and tear up his animals. But he’d always had pets at home, both dogs and cats. “He told me that shooting dogs in the woods is ‘purely business.’ ”

Mick Legassi confirmed that Ruthie had once put a dress on her son because he’d disobeyed and gone down to a creek, and she was afraid he was going to drown. But it was only that one time. He couldn’t remember that Barney had ever had mood swings or acted crazy.

All in all, Legassi thought his stepson was a good guy. “If he’s the Green River Killer—and I don’t think he is,” he said firmly, “well, he would say so!”

FRANK ADAMSON got his search warrant, and later that Thursday evening, February 6, 1986, detectives and F.B.I. agents swarmed over the Tikkenborg house, which was located on a short private street a block from Pac HiWay. Neighbors watched in shock as a hooded figure, whom they assumed to be Barney, was taken away in a police car, and detectives and agents carried out items to be tested.

The hooded figure was not Barney Tikkenborg. He had been detained on his way home from a cement finishing job near Snoqualmie Pass when the car he was riding in was sandwiched between unmarked police units that suddenly flashed blue “bubble lights” on their dashboards. With guns drawn, several task force members and F.B.I. agents ordered him out of his boss’s car.

His wife, Sara,* was being picked up at her job at the same time. Both were transported to F.B.I. headquarters in downtown Seattle.

Several of the Tikkenborgs’ neighbors were coaxed to comment on-camera by television crews. Their words sounded like every neighbor’s in every shocking murder, fire, natural disaster, or tragedy in any neighborhood in any city. “I can’t believe it. They’re such a nice couple. Such good neighbors…This just doesn’t happen in a neighborhood like ours.”

If ever a police operation was compromised by a determined army of reporters and photographers, this was it. Helicopters hovered overhead with floodlights illuminating the scene and reporters got in the way of the task force investigators. Over at task force headquarters, Fae Brooks did her best to placate the reporters who surrounded her. “We have made no arrests. We are talking to a person of interest.”

The public’s right to know, and to know immediately, was obviously tantamount in the media’s minds and conflicted with the task force’s urgent need to do what it had to do.

Given the information the Green River Task Force had gathered on Barney Tikkenborg, surely the probable cause for a search warrant had been met. But the Tikkenborg incident was to be a major public relations disaster. And there was no reason that had to happen. Without the glare of strobe lights and the intrusion of microphones, the search warrant could have been served quietly without undue attention on the family that lived there.

Tikkenborg was questioned for several hours by Jim Doyon of the task force and an F.B.I. agent. He denied having any knowledge whatsoever about the Green River murders, which wasn’t surprising. Of course, they had expected that. No suspect was likely to say, “I did it! I killed them all!” the first time he was questioned. Tikkenborg was angry and his wife was angry. He volunteered to take a lie detector test.

And he passed. Absolutely passed. It was a major blow to the task force and to Frank Adamson personally. He had been so sure, and his expert advisers had concurred. They had believed they had the right man. And now it seemed that all their deductive reasoning had been wrong. They had no choice but to release Tikkenborg.

Criminalists continued to evaluate possible evidence taken from his home: all the bloodstained items, which they had expected to find, of course, all the hairs and fibers. But, in the end, Barney Tikkenborg was eliminated as a suspect in the Green River murders three months later.

By reading the next day’s papers and tuning into television, it had certainly looked as if the long investigation was over. Headlines blazed; the entire front pages of both Seattle papers trumpeted the news, and smaller local papers echoed the story. Some printed Tikkenborg’s name and address, while others did not. Some featured a picture of his house with the address clearly visible on a shingle outside.

Frank Adamson faced the wrath of the reporter who had agreed to hold back his scoop. Adamson met with him and explained the truth—he had promised only to give the man first chance for an interview after an arrest was made. As it was, it had been completely out of his hands anyway as the feeding frenzy of the press and airways proliferated.

“I met him in a restaurant in Fremont and he was mighty upset,” Adamson said. “But as it turned out, we ended up arresting the suspect, took him to the F.B.I. office and he passed the polygraph. That became my downfall. We made the search, we got bad publicity, and it was an opportunity for the politicians to plan to get rid of me because it was a low point. We’d focused a lot of our energy and the press’s energy on the wrong guy. I felt like I was standing on a board when someone was sawing through the other end.”

Technically, Adamson would be on the task force from December 1983 to January of 1987, but he sensed which way the wind was blowing. He had begun with the belief that he and his detectives would surely solve the murders of the dead girls, but he was worn down, battered on every side. It was ironic. A public and press that had shouted that the task force must “do something” was now eager to condemn them because they had done something, and it proved to be wrong.

As the task force members had expected, Tim Hill, the new King County executive, held the opinion that it was always better to “spend less,” and the Green River investigation was draining the county’s coffers.

“There was publicity about the cases,” Adamson said, “but also publicity about the expense of the task force. People complained. After the search on Tikkenborg’s house, it got worse. I didn’t feel that just because we couldn’t prove that this particular person did it, it was the end. There were other suspects.”

That was true, but being on the Green River Task Force was hard going now.

Both the media and the detectives were being judged harshly. More than two months after the search of Barney Tikkenborg’s house and the abortive probe into his life, the Los Angeles Times printed a very long article on the front page of its Sunday edition, tsk-tsking about the “near hysteria” caused by Seattle’s television coverage of the detainment of an innocent suspect, and taking swipes at both TV newscasters and the task force. However, the Los Angeles Times article also listed the real names of the fur trapper and his wife, perpetuating, it would seem, the attention focused on them.

Proving that Tikkenborg had been in no trouble at all with the law since 1967, the outraged couple sued three media outlets and eventually collected $30,000.

And, all the time, he must have been watching the news coverage gleefully. He knew who the real Green River Killer was, and he enjoyed the fact that his persona as an unknown killer was getting so much attention from the media. He especially liked to see the task force members end up with egg on their faces. They had talked to him, but he was convinced they didn’t have a clue. He had completely snowed them, and they had gone off chasing somebody else.

39

COTTONWOOD PARK is just north of the Meeker Street Bridge on Frager Road, a shabby little stretch of stubbly grass between the road and the river in the eighties, with a few picnic tables gray and splintery from too much moisture and not enough maintenance. It is close to Des Moines, but I never heard of anyone actually going there on a picnic, or to swim for that matter. Beyond that, everyone who lived in the area remembered that Wendy Lee Coffield, Debra Lynn Bonner, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Marcia Chapman had been found less than half a mile away in the river. That made Cottonwood seem like a ghost park, and it hadn’t been that appealing to begin with.

In March 1986, two Kent Park Department workers discovered what appeared to be human bones at the base of a large tree in the park. There were enough bones to know that it was a young female, but not enough to identify her with the forensic science available at the time. There was no skull, no mandibles, no teeth, just a human torso and spine. It would take thirteen more years to know that this was the only part of Tracy Winston ever found. Mitochondrial DNA, which compares the unknown subject with the DNA makeup of a possible mother, verified in 1999 that the young woman left in Cottonwood Park was the tall, dimpled daughter of Chuck and Mertie Winston, the girl who had vowed to change her life just hours before her death.

Mertie had known for years that her only daughter was gone, but the knowledge that she was absolutely, finally, dead was almost too painful to bear. It always would be. The long wait had probably contributed to Mertie’s stroke at a young age, but she fought to recover—and she did. When she finally learned the truth, it seemed ironic that Tracy had been so close to home all along, even though her many moves had taken her far north of Seattle.

“I’m not going to second-guess why this happened to Tracy, and to us,” Mertie said in 2004. “God had his purpose that we had her for such a short time: nineteen years, eleven months, and two weeks.”

The spring of 1986 continued to reveal what the Green River Killer believed he had hidden forever. On May 2, 1986, an employee of Echo Glen, who was looking for a runaway teenager near a pullout off Highway 18 just south of the juncture of 18 and Highway 90, looked down and saw some weathered bones. It was Maureen Feeney, who had disappeared on September 28, 1983. Her family had reported her missing two years and eight months earlier. Maureen had been so thrilled to be living on her own near Bellevue. But she had been enticed into a dangerous life in Seattle. Ironically, her body had been left not far from her first apartment.

In June 1986, Kim Nelson’s skull and a few bones were found not far away in a deeply forested area off I-90 at Exit 38. Kim, also known as Tina Tomson, had been only a couple of miles from where Delise Plager and Lisa Yates were found in early 1984. Now her relatives would know why she hadn’t come home to Ann Arbor for Christmas. Kim’s father had died a few months before she was finally identified, and one of her sisters suffered a nervous breakdown after dealing with too many tragedies. Until there is a formal identification of the remains of a murder victim, relatives cling to a tiny glow of hope amid overwhelming anxiety. Afterward, hope is gone, and there is another phase of grief to deal with.

OFFICIALLY, there were no longer any new disappearances in the Seattle area, and the public seemed to have grown bored with an investigation that apparently had no end and no answers. In November of 1986, I was still convinced that I would soon be writing a book about the Green River murders. Because I have saved every scribbled-up calendar since 1972, it’s easy to look back and see what I was doing as long as thirty years ago. And a few words bring back images of events as if they had happened only last week.

That November I accepted an invitation from a King County deputy I had not met before to be taken on a tour of the body sites near North Bend. I figured it was an opportunity to learn the topography and the vegetation of the areas where the Green River Killer had left his tragic victims. I’d eaten many times at Ken’s Truck Stop, and each of my children had spent a week in the spring at Camp Waskowitz, but I’d never been into the woods on roads so narrow that they looked like trails.

It was a bleak, sunless day and whatever light there was had disappeared well before four in the afternoon. I must admit that I began to feel nervous, spooked, as the deputy turned into one area that looked more like a moonscape than the forests of the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. There, I had the sensation that I really didn’t know this man at all, and in the back of my mind was the knowledge that many people believed that the Green River Killer was a cop. Wondering if I had been really stupid to drive around with a deputy I didn’t know, I told him I didn’t want to see any more body sites.

But that was the climate of the times. Every woman in King County was somewhat nervous and all men were suspect.

THERE WAS GOOD REASON to be wary. Hope Redding* was neither a teenage hitchhiker nor a woman who frequented the streets. Her lifestyle was totally different from the victims of the Green River Killer. She was a professional woman, married, and extremely cautious because she had once been the victim of a sexual assault. After that, she vowed that no man would ever do that again, even if she had to die fighting him. She followed every safety guide there was, and under almost any circumstance, she would never get into a stranger’s car.

In 1986, Hope was driving home from work along a dark road in the Maple Valley area of King County. Her car sputtered and stopped and nothing she tried got it started again. A short time later, a pickup truck slowed and then pulled over to the side of the road. She watched the driver approach her car and she checked the locks on the doors. Good. All locked. He was saying something to her through the window on the driver’s side and she rolled it down only an inch.

“Pop your hood,” he shouted. “I’m pretty good at cars.”

That might be safe enough. Cell phones weren’t common in 1986 and she had no way to call for help. Her husband wouldn’t know where to look for her. She either had to trust this man to take a look under the hood, hike miles in the dark to find a phone, or spend a cold night locked in her car. She popped the hood.

The helpful stranger wasn’t a very big man; he probably wasn’t any taller than she was, and he didn’t look muscular. She could hear him tapping and banging on things as he tried to find what the problem was. Time passed and she realized he had spent twenty minutes or more trying to help her. Finally, he slammed the hood down and walked back to her window.

“I can’t fix it,” he said. “It needs parts I don’t have, but I can give you a ride to where you can call someone to come and get you.”

Hope felt guilty for having doubted him in the beginning. How many strangers would stand out in the cold rain for so long trying to help someone? She nodded, grabbed her purse, and followed him to his truck.

He didn’t say much as they headed toward a crossroads where she knew there was a 7-Eleven, and he didn’t even glance at her. He had been so nice that she decided she should give him something for the time he’d spent trying to help her. She opened her purse and began to fish around for her wallet. The driver glanced over at her in alarm.

“He freaked,” she recalled. “I think he thought I was reaching for a gun. Since he seemed so nervous, I shut my purse.”

Now she began to feel vaguely uneasy as they sped through the night. She figured it was probably because she’d just broken her own rule about getting into a stranger’s car. She saw the 7-Eleven up ahead and prepared to hop out of his truck. But he didn’t slow down at all, and soon the convenience store was behind them, and the road ahead was even darker and less familiar. She asked him where he was going and he only grunted.

“I started swearing at him,” Hope recalled. “And I never swear at anyone. But I was yelling at him, telling him to stop and let me out. I drove my elbow into his ribs as hard as I could.”

He glanced angrily at her and Hope realized that he had never intended to stop. He turned corners again and again until she was disoriented about where she was. The road they were on now dead-ended at a junkyard of some sort. “I hit him and fought him and we were struggling inside the cab of his truck,” she said. “We fell out the door and I was fighting him on the ground. I was probably in the best condition I’d ever been in in my life—I went to aerobics three times a week—and I was not going to let him overpower me. He kept calling me ‘Bitch’ and I could tell he was terribly angry.”

As they rolled and tumbled on the muddy ground, she saw him sweep his free hand along the ground, reaching for something, a rock maybe, to smash against her head. And he was angling to get his other arm around her throat so he could crush her windpipe.

“I did what I had to,” Hope said. “I sunk my teeth as deep as I could into his arm, and he let go.”

She ran into the darkness that surrounded them, and hid. She could hear him crashing around, looking for her and she held her breath. Finally, he gave up and drove away. She managed to follow lights and find a phone, but Hope Redding would have nightmares for a long time. And many years later, when she recognized a picture of the man who might have killed her, she called the Green River Task Force.