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: 4 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

3

DICK KRASKE had been wise to keep as much information from the media about the five bodies in the Green River as he could. “They hammered us from day two and never let up,” he remembered, wincing. “Throughout the rest of my time in this investigation, my attitude was you should not get into a pissing contest with a skunk—or anyone who buys ink by the barrel. There were times when I thought it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to go across the street and apply [for a job] at the Fire Department.”

The press and local television investigative reporters were anxious to link the victims by concluding that they had all worked the highway stroll. It made natural headlines. Prostitutes being murdered suggested a titillating story. Moreover, citizens, living in nice safe houses, whose wives and daughters were never alone on the streets could be reassured. Their female family members weren’t offering sex for money, and they had no tattoos or drug habits, so they could conclude that a roving killer was no danger to them.

DICK KRASKE had wasted no time. On Monday, August 16, he organized the initial Green River Task Force with twenty-five investigators from King County, the Seattle Police Department, the Tacoma Police Department, and the Kent Police Department. It was a prescient decision. No one could have even imagined what lay ahead.

They didn’t know at that point how many killers they were looking for. It was possible there was more than one. Killing partners were not unknown. In the early eighties, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were boasting of over three hundred victims in their deadly travels around America, and Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono had racked up a tragic toll of young female victims in Los Angeles before Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, and committed more murders on his own. Two men working together and obsessed with killing wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. One man, bringing a single body, day after day, to this river hiding place was a more likely scenario. Perhaps he even had a vehicle large enough to hold more than one of his victims, all of whom needed to be hidden as soon as possible.

With the discovery of the last three bodies in a secluded site along the river, the consensus was that probably all five of the victims had gone into the Green River at that point. But Wendy Coffield’s and Debra Bonner’s bodies had drifted downstream until they were caught on something.

The investigators had no doubt that the killer had watched the nightly news, realized his mistake at not weighting the dead girls down, and rectified that with the rocks and boulders. He was crafty, obviously unafraid to take five victims in one month, but smart enough to hone his technique to evade the detectives who were now stalking him. But his “dump site” had been discovered and he couldn’t go back there now.

4

PEOPLE who lived in King County, Washington, weren’t afraid. Yes, there were five unsolved murders in the county, and it might even be true that the deaths were in all likelihood connected to a common killer or killers. But the backgrounds of the victims, soon manipulated and smoothed and shaped into a single image by the media, showed them to be young female prostitutes who hitchhiked. Every one of them had died within a month, as if some deadly tornado had swept through the Kent Valley, a faceless killer who had destroyed them and then moved on. The lay public wanted to believe their murderer was a drifter who had already left the area.

The girls who were still out on the streets were working because most of them had no other way to survive. They were a little anxious, and a lot of them tried to get a gun, or they carried a knife in their shoes. Outreach workers advised them to “Stay in groups. Don’t go out on ‘dates’ unless you’ve known them before. If you get a negative feeling, don’t get in the car. Follow your intuition.”

But they weren’t dealing with Girl Scouts or students on a school trip. How often would young prostitutes know the men who stopped to pick them up? They had to take chances.

“We even tell them to get off the streets,” one of the more naive social workers said. “But that’s a joke to them. They think they can handle anything.”

And some of the working girls believed they could, while others worried about what to do. Many relocated to Portland, finding Seattle too scary. One teenage prostitute shook her head and said, “Even Portland isn’t safe. They think a ‘trick’ maybe killed all those girls. Well, just like we travel, tricks do, too. You never know whether he is here today or will be here tomorrow.”

Needing rent or food or drug money, most of the girls returned to their regular haunts. The weather was warm in late August and it was light out until nine or so. They knew other people whose world was the Strip and they began to feel safe again.

The rest of August 1982 passed without incident. The bad times were probably over. At least everyone wanted to believe it was over, something frightening that had touched them briefly but hadn’t really interfered with their lives.

Still, what had happened was not nearly as isolated as it first seemed to be. Looking at those hellish weeks in July and August was like walking into a movie in the middle. Maybe the summer of 1982 was not the first chapter of horror after all.

There were some similar cases in the Greater Seattle area from early in 1982 that troubled those who remembered them—cops and reporters and families who had lived through them. Adding to a faint sense of dread was the phenomenon that occurs in slow news periods. Columnists and TV news producers look for crime statistics or murders that might be connectable to scare up a story. Way back on Valentine’s Day, popular columnist Rick Anderson filled an entire page of the Sunday Seattle Times with the details of the deaths of three young women.

Leann Wilcox was sixteen in October 1981, and she was a lovely-looking girl, but from the moment she entered puberty, she changed from an agreeable child to an incorrigible thirteen-year-old who was placed in a group home in Spokane when her mother could not control her. By the time she was sixteen, she was familiar with the street life and had four arrests for prostitution. She came home occasionally and vowed to change her life. But nothing lasted. Leann left for good on October 17, 1981.

Her mother’s final phone conversation with her was typical of the acrimony that marked their struggles with each other. Leann said she wasn’t going back to school and she wouldn’t be home for Christmas either.

Exhausted and frustrated, her mother said something she would always regret: “Leann, my door has always been open to you; you know that. But as long as you live like you are, then I don’t want you home anymore.”

Leann hung up on her. A month later, on January 21, 1982, two men found her body facedown in a weed patch at S. 380th and Military Road South. Friends had seen her only two days before. With her wine-colored jacket thrown over her, she seemed almost to be sleeping, but she was dead, beaten and strangled.

On January 29, 1982, Virginia Taylor, eighteen, headed for a bus in southwest Seattle. It would take her to her job as a dancer in a peep show on the seediest section of First Avenue. Virginia had visualized her life as so much happier than it was. She was a bride, but her groom slept alone on a prison bunk, serving five years for theft. Virginia’s job, where men sat in booths and dropped quarters into a slot to raise the curtains so they could watch half-nude girls gyrate and strip behind a glass wall, didn’t pay that well. But it sure paid more than taking orders in a drive-through burger joint. Virginia hated her shifts in the booth. She was more modest than most of the girls at the peep show, so she wasn’t a favorite of the patrons. And the piles of quarters weren’t worth stripping all the way or accommodating requests from kinky customers.

Despite her job, Virginia was generally cautious, yet she occasionally hitchhiked. Nobody saw her get on the number 20 bus that January day, and nobody remembered seeing her beyond two blocks from her sister’s house.

Schoolchildren found her body later that day in a muddy field. She was fully clothed and she had been strangled. The only suspect was a girl Virginia’s own age who had threatened her in a silly feud over a stolen coat, and that had been a year before her murder. It was unlikely that a female would have had the strength to choke Virginia to death.

Joan Conner, sixteen, had lived with her mother in a small house in the far north end of Seattle. On Thursday morning, February 4, 1982, her mother left a bus pass for Joan and suggested it was a good day for her to look for a job. Joan had dropped out of school, and she hadn’t worked since she left McDonald’s employ the previous fall.

“Okay, Mom,” she said. “But I’m going to try to sell some Campfire mints, too.”

Joan belonged to the Campfire Horizon Club for teenagers, and she had no ties at all to prostitution or First Avenue. But she encountered someone infinitely dangerous. Joan was found dead later that day. She had been beaten and strangled and her body thrown out of a car on Fremont Street near the Ship Canal. Her purse, her identification, her GED certificate were all missing.

Joan Conner’s mother, who had worried all Thursday night when her daughter failed to come home, was nervously watching the noon news the next day. She saw a young woman’s body being placed in the medical examiner’s van and she knew in her heart it was Joan. “That’s Joan. That’s Joan,” she gasped to a friend, not knowing how she knew, but feeling ice in her veins as she saw only the form in a body bag.

Tragically, she was right.

The three victims hadn’t known each other. They shared only their youth and the manner of their deaths. The public had well-nigh forgotten them by August 1982, but the detectives who worked to find their killer or killers remembered them. The question was: Were they connected to the Green River murders?

Perhaps they were, but their cases were not initially considered to be part of the Green River puzzle.

In any city of considerable size, there are always open homicide cases. Detectives work those cases they call “losers” more avidly than laymen ever realize. They do it quietly and with great determination, but they know too well the falsity of the old adage “There is no such thing as a perfect murder.”

If you use the criteria that some killers are never caught, then there are countless perfect murders. Strangers who kill strangers and move on are the most likely to evade detection. However, if they continue to kill, the chance that they will leave behind clues that can be traced back to them grows. But computers were not generally in use in most homicide units in the eighties; they were expensive, complicated, and not considered to be of much value in investigations.

Furthermore, nobody voiced a concern in 1982 that a serial killer might be loose in King County. As widespread as they are today in movies, books, and on television, serial killers were virtually unrecognized as such by the general public and by most members of law enforcement. Few had even heard the term serial killer. Certainly, Ted Bundy, with more than three dozen young female victims, was a serial killer. But when he was sentenced to death in 1979 and again in 1980, the media referred to him as a “mass murderer.”

The concept of a serial murderer—someone who killed similar victims one after another after another—had bloomed years before in the thought processes of one of the greatest homicide detectives of them all: Pierce Brooks. Confident that he was on to something way back in the fifties, Brooks did his research by visiting libraries when he was off duty, looking through old newspaper files for multiple-murder cases all across America. I remember his telling me, “Ann, there weren’t any computers for cops then. It would have taken all of L.A.P.D. headquarters just to hold one of those first computers.”

Once captain of the Homicide Unit in the Los Angeles Police Department, and later police chief in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, Brooks wondered if criminologists had failed to recognize this kind of killer, for which he coined the term serial killer.

In March of 1983, Brooks would be responsible for a gathering of eagles among the top ranks of law enforcement to consider the problem of killers whose victim tolls rose into the double digits. He enlisted special agents in the Behavioral Science Unit (B.S.U.) of the F.B.I. and the U.S. Justice Department, along with top cops from cities, counties, and states all over America to confer at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Most of the B.S.U. special agents agreed with Brooks’s theory that there was a unique and terrifying kind of killer roving just beneath the level of our awareness across the United States.

But this was August 1982, and the first five victims found in the Green River were still deemed to be the prey of a “mass murderer.” They were not. They had, almost certainly, been killed by a serial killer, and within months, that would be understood.

The arena of forensic science has expanded again and again since 1982, and as Dick Kraske’s task force began to pencil in a rough list of young female murder victims who might be connected, they suspected that they were dealing with a force of evil far greater than the general public realized. It didn’t matter that only five young women had been found in the river, all the subsequent victims would be attributed ever after to “The Green River Killer.”

IT WAS APRIL 1982, when Theresa Kline, twenty-seven, was last seen alive in Windy’s Pub at Aurora Avenue N. and 103rd. She was a very pretty woman with long auburn hair, and people remembered her. She had planned to visit her boyfriend, a professional gambler, who was playing poker in a cardroom several blocks away. Theresa asked her friends in Windy’s if any of them were heading north after closing hours, but they all shook their heads. She smiled and said she would catch a bus or hitchhike if she had to. It was 12:35 AM when she left the tavern. Five minutes later, one of her girlfriends walked outside, headed for a nearby gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. Theresa was gone.

Less than three hours after that, Theresa’s body was found in an alley eleven blocks away. She had been manually strangled.

Theresa was a divorcée with one son and her ex-husband had custody, although she visited her little boy often. She had been very happy the night she was murdered, and she was definitely headed to meet her boyfriend. She wasn’t selling sex, even though Aurora Avenue was the north end Strip. Theresa wanted very much to have her son back with her, but she knew she couldn’t do that until she had a job, and she had started a new job the night before. Things were suddenly looking up for her.

So far, Theresa’s murder was unsolved.

Patricia Jo Crossman, fifteen, was a chronic runaway who had been arrested three times for prostitution. On June 13, she was found dead of stab wounds in the Garden Villa Apartments on S. 204th Street near the city limits of Des Moines. These apartments were near what was considered the southern tip of the SeaTac Strip.

Angelita Bell Axelson, twenty-five, had not been seen since sometime in the spring of 1982. No one kept very close track of her, and witnesses could remember only that she’d been with an unidentified man in a downtown Seattle transient hotel. Her body, badly decomposed, was found on June 18. She, too, had been strangled.

Unsolved cases involving young women were not peculiar to Seattle and King County. Snohomish County detectives, who worked in the county just north of King County, had their share, and so did Pierce County to the south. In fact, Snohomish County had a case somewhat similar to the Green River cases. It dated back to February 1982. Oneida Peterson, twenty-four, had last been seen as she waited for a bus to Marysville, Washington. Her strangled body was found on February 8, off the rural Sultan Basin Road. She had never been involved in prostitution.

Some of the women killed in early 1982 went on the Green River Killer victim list, and some did not. It was impossible to know if all the crimes were attributable to a single killer. Their ages and manner of death were alike, but their lifestyles differed. Ominously, the list grew longer. The entries may or may not have been correct. Some experts felt the range was too wide; others thought it wasn’t inclusive enough.

In March 1982, several girls who made their living on the streets reported a weirdo to the Seattle Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. A man had threatened them, using his Doberman as a weapon. He told them that he would command “Duke” to bite them if they didn’t get into his 1967 Mustang. Those who obeyed him were raped, and then subjected to a bizarre lecture. The rapist warned them that they were going to hell if they didn’t change their ways.

Those reports sounded as if a kinky-sadistic-religious psycho was out there preying on any woman he could find alone and either force or entice into his vehicle.

It was too early in a killing spree to look at the total number of murdered women throughout 1982 and see them as unknown and interchangeable entities who could very well be Green River victims. Many of the photos that accompanied the news coverage of the girls who were dead or missing were mug shots from prostitution arrests. There could have been many different killers. The victims all looked tired and sad and a little defiant, but more resolved to the life they were caught in. Some of their faces were tearstained, and they all looked years older than they really were. Those mug shots instantly separated them from the college girls and young women who lived in dorms or nice apartments in middle– and upper-class neighborhoods—Bundy’s classic victims of eight years earlier.

The five victims whose bodies had floated in the heedless Green River were lumped together because of where they had been found, but they weren’t really that much like one another, even though it was easy to infer that they had all met the same killing machine of a man.

Amina Agisheff, thirty-seven, was one of the first names on the extended Green River list even though she didn’t fit into any of the predictable categories. She was twice as old as many of the dead girls, she was not a prostitute, she didn’t hitchhike, she was a Russian immigrant, and she had a stable loving family, a loving boyfriend, and young children. She was a hard worker who couldn’t afford a car.

On July 7, 1982, Amina left her mother’s apartment after a visit and was waiting for a bus on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. And she simply vanished, leaving her family to agonize over where she might be. When her picture appeared in the news alongside other presumed Green River victims, Amina always looked out of place. Perhaps she was added to the grim roster because she disappeared a week before Wendy Coffield’s body was found.

5

FOR THE GREEN RIVER Task Force, it was akin to playing a game with no rules. There may have been many victims already, or was it possible that there were only five? There was no telling how many suspects they were looking for. With victims whose lives were peripatetic, moving from city to city or from one motel or apartment after another, it was difficult to know if they were truly missing. Many women on the streets lost touch with their families, who were spread out across America. In such cases, they might not be reported as missing until they hadn’t called home for two Christmases in a row or for Mother’s Day. They might be dead, but no one knew that except their killers.

When college girls vanish, their roommates or housemothers or families have great difficulty waiting the forty-eight hours required to make an adult “Missing” report. When runaways and kids on the street disappear, all too often there is no one to sound the alarm that they are gone.

For the initial Green River Task Force, it seemed more likely that the women found in the river were the only victims, that it was over, and the man who murdered them had either moved on or stopped killing. Now, looking at it with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, the pattern of multiple murder is crystal clear.

But it most definitely was not in the months that passed from August 1982 to November 1983. Validating disappearances and identifying true victims was as difficult as finding beads from a broken necklace, dozens of them rolling on the floor and becoming lost in crevices and under desks and cabinets. Who could ever know how many there had already been, or how many were yet to be found and restrung into a strand that connected them all?

 

GISELLE LOVVORN was seventeen in the summer of 1982. She had no ties to the Seattle area, but earlier that year her boyfriend had persuaded her to leave California with him. Jake Baker,* known as “Jak-Bak,” was several years older than Giselle. He had street savvy and had pulled enough bunco ploys in California that a move was beneficial—even urgent—for him. He figured he should start over in new territory. He got a job driving a cab on the SeaTac Strip.

Giselle was the youngest child of an upper-middle-class family in the San Fernando Valley, where her father had his own insurance business. She was an unhappy girl who had begun to run away from home when she was only fourteen, and she dropped out of school in the tenth grade. She had been miserable in California, ever since the family moved there from New Orleans a few years earlier. Her father wondered if it was because the district they lived in bused students to inner-city schools. Out of place ethnically, looking so different from her classmates, Giselle had been beaten up and robbed of her lunch money. It seemed impossible for her to make friends or to fit into any group in school, and she was lonely.

Whatever the reason, she refused to go back to school. Her parents certainly weren’t happy to see her with Jak-Bak; he was too old for Giselle, and he wasn’t the kind of man who would encourage their daughter to finish her education. That was a tremendous loss because Giselle was very intelligent; she read constantly and her I.Q. had tested at 145, well above genius level on some tests. She was a voracious reader and her favorite book was Colleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds.

In her perfect longhand, Giselle wrote out McCullough’s description of a songbird who was born to seek out the thorn tree, find the sharpest, longest thorn to impale itself upon—so that it might sing one high perfect note as it died.

Many of Giselle’s thoughts were dark, and she appeared to find themes of death somehow romantic, even though she seemed sunny and upbeat on the surface. Like thousands upon thousands of other fans, she idolized Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead, and was proud to follow their concerts, considering herself a devout “Dead Head.”

Giselle also liked the Charlie Daniels Band, and she collected antique Jack Daniel’s whiskey labels. She wasn’t very different from other young women of the late seventies–early eighties in her wardrobe, wearing long peasant skirts whose hems came undone because they swept the rough ground; tight, long-sleeved cotton shirts, without a bra, of course; and little makeup.

But she was more rebellious than most. Her parents could only hope that she would outgrow the wanderer streak that had taken her around the country with only a backpack to hold all her possessions. Sometimes Jak-Bak went with her, but she often traveled alone, calling him or calling home for money orders when she was broke. She sometimes landed in places like Fargo, North Dakota, or Cut Bank, Montana, or Eugene, Oregon, as she followed the Grateful Dead concerts. Western Union records showed that Giselle was at a truck stop in West Fargo, North Dakota, on June 3, 1982, to pick up a fifty-dollar money order that Jak-Bak had sent her.

Giselle’s family was actually relieved when she traveled to Seattle for what they believed would be the final time before she turned her life around. She assured them that she was only going to pick up some possessions that Jak-Bak was holding for her, and then she was coming home to settle down and go back to school.

But within a week she changed her mind and decided to stay in Seattle. Jak-Bak was a master at persuasion, and he had evidently sweet-talked her into staying with him.

Giselle was a small girl whose thick blond hair tumbled down her back. She had freckles and looked wholesome and young, but she was soon working the SeaTac Strip. Her appearance appealed to certain males cruising the Strip—the ones who liked the “schoolgirl look.”

Giselle was strolling along the highway in mid-1982, looking for tricks. Jak-Bak knew it and didn’t stop her even though he later told detectives and reporters that he cared deeply for her and had done his best to talk her out of prostitution. He insisted that their living arrangement was merely platonic.

More likely, theirs was a typical relationship between an opportunistic man and a girl who didn’t seem to question that if the man who was “protecting” her really loved her, he wouldn’t allow her to sell herself to complete strangers. By the time most girls figured that out, it wasn’t easy to break the ties.

But Giselle had some happy times in Seattle. On July 13, she got to see a Charlie Daniels concert. Four days later, Giselle left their apartment at one in the afternoon. It was a Saturday, and, according to Jak-Bak, she planned to turn three or four tricks. He said he’d asked her not to go but she’d been adamant about her plans.

If she had read local papers that week, she would have seen the coverage about the bodies in the Green River, and the murders were all over the news on television, too. But Giselle wasn’t familiar with Seattle, and she really knew only the area around the airport. She probably didn’t even know where the Green River was.

Afternoon became evening and Giselle didn’t come back to the apartment. Not that night. Not on Sunday. Everything she owned and the only person she really knew in Seattle, everything that mattered to her, was in the little apartment on First Avenue South and S. 180th.

Jak-Bak soon warmed to the glow of media attention and gave many interviews. He recalled that he had tried to report Giselle missing right away, but the police wouldn’t take him seriously. That wasn’t true. They had listened to him, and Giselle had officially gone on their missing persons list on July 17.

Jak-Bak said he’d met Giselle in a Los Angeles–area restaurant a year earlier and they had become best friends. “We weren’t intimate,” he said sadly, “but we were really, really close.” He and Giselle had shared their Seattle apartment with another man. He told reporters that he had continued to look for Giselle on the Strip, at truck stops, motels, and bars, but he never found her. She had left everything behind, even her treasured backpack; all she took with her was her California I.D. card, which falsely listed her age as nineteen, not seventeen.

Jak-Bak said Giselle’s plan was to establish a regular clientele so she could have a career as a call girl and not have to stroll the highway. He had urged her to get a job in a delicatessen or some other straight employment, but she was headstrong and believed that she could take care of herself.

Perhaps. Or perhaps she was following a plan he had outlined for her.

IN MID-SEPTEMBER, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a “blind” story that quoted King County lieutenant Greg Boyle as saying the task force was investigating the possible disappearance of two more young women who fit the “profile” of the Green River victims. One was Giselle Lovvorn, although her name was not mentioned. The other was Mary Bridget Meehan, eighteen. Her boyfriend, Ray, reported that he had last seen her on September 15 as she left the Western Six Motel just off the Strip. He said she had planned to walk to the Lewis and Clark Theater that day. It was a two-mile walk, a long way for a girl who was eight months pregnant. Bridget and Ray hadn’t come to the Strip from very far away; they’d both lived in Bellevue, just across the floating bridge from Seattle, all their lives.

“Was she working?” detectives asked Ray.

He shook his head, seemingly confused. “I don’t know.”

KING COUNTY detectives had now talked to almost three hundred people as they looked for connections between the first five victims and witnesses who might have seen or heard anything unusual. They had made a request of the Behavioral Science Unit of the F.B.I., asking for as thorough a profile as they could come up with on the man, or men, they were looking for.

The task force knew now that Wendy Lee Coffield and Opal Mills had attended the same continuation school in Renton, but there was no indication that they had known each other or been seen together at the end of their lives. And Debra Bonner and Cynthia Hinds had patronized the same bar in Tacoma. It was probable that they had been at least acquainted, although no one at the bar could remember ever seeing them come in together. It was an intricate pattern that the investigators would find again and again; people whose lives revolved around the Strip often knew each other, if only tangentially.

As for the two missing girls, they might come home again. Or they might be dead.

The first Green River suspect to merit headlines was Debra Bonner’s lover/pimp, Max Tackley. By August 21, the thirty-one-year-old former University of Washington student was being held for questioning while three detectives searched his small house in Tacoma. Tackley had given his permission for the search, and Detective Bob LaMoria, Detective Dave Reichert’s partner, remarked, “We either have to prove him innocent or prove him guilty.”