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: 7 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

His cabdriver friends acknowledged that Foster liked young girls, and said the girls had used him. “They called him a ‘Sugar Daddy,’ ” one man said, “and he’d buy them meals or clothes or give them back rubs.” Kelly, now his ex-fiancée, explained that she broke up with Foster because he’d become obsessed with a fourteen-year-old girl. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.”

Foster admitted that his sex drive finally overcame his reservations with Kelly, but swore he had not touched any other teenagers. And he denied that he would ever hit or hurt a woman, although he didn’t back away from a fight with a man. “For many years, I have only harmed men in defending the helpless, or, with no reasonable alternative, myself, and with the aggressor on the ground, I would end the incident by walking away; murder is not in me to commit.”

Ending his press conference on a positive note, Melvyn Foster said he was corresponding with a pretty twenty-three-year-old bartender in West Virginia who was interested in moving to Washington State to marry him if they could raise the money for travel and a place of their own. “You get those daughters of a coal miner’s family and you’ve got somebody who will stick it out with you, so I think I’m going to go for it,” he said with a grin.

Despite his obvious enjoyment at being newsworthy, Melvyn Foster’s efforts to join the investigation had brought him a lot more attention than he expected, and it wasn’t positive attention. It would be a safe bet to believe he regretted ever coming forward to “help” in the first place.

He complained to the cameras that the task force members had made a terrible “mess” when they searched his house. “That was interesting to watch on TV,” Dick Kraske remembered, “because I personally instructed the crime scene specialists and everyone else there to put things back in order before we left. We even washed all of the coffee cups we had dusted—with negative results—and hung them back on the rack in the kitchen.”

As incensed as he claimed to be, Melvyn Foster always seemed to be there, a presence at the edge of the Green River probe, as if he couldn’t stay away. Green River detectives now placed him under surveillance for at least three weeks, monitoring all his movements twenty-four hours a day.

The officers who kept track of him noted that he met with another prominent figure in the investigation most evenings at the Ebb Tide restaurant in Kent, just a few hundred feet from the Green River, to share confidences and cocktails.

Barbara Kubik-Patten was a middle-aged housewife, mother, and self-styled psychic/private detective. She had inserted herself into the investigation even before Foster. Indeed, on the Sunday in August when investigators pulled three bodies from the Green River, Dick Kraske had looked up to see two Kent detectives approaching on either side of a woman. The woman, Kubik-Patten, had somehow heard of the body retrieval. She had prevailed upon the Kent investigators to take her to the river.

Convinced that she had had visions of murder that had come true, she would continue to insist that she could be vitally important to the Green River Task Force. Kubik-Patten would not have been particularly memorable except for the fact that she and Foster spent a lot of time together, and she kept appearing on both the SeaTac Strip and on the banks of the Green River.

Although she was not known in psychic circles in the Seattle area, Kubik-Patten insisted that she “saw” and “heard” things that ordinary people didn’t. She told Dave Reichert that she was quite sure she had picked up Opal Mills sometime during the summer while the teenager was hitchhiking.

Later, on July 14, something had drawn Kubik-Patten to the Green River. She said she had seen a small pale-colored car there, and heard screams. The name “Opal” or “Opel” had vibrated over and over in her head. Sometimes, Kubik-Patten said, she had chased after the mysterious car, and sometimes she recalled only that it had been parked near the river and then sped away, distancing itself from her so that she couldn’t catch up. She now believed devoutly that she must have been present when Opal Mills was being murdered.

It is a rare detective who gives much credence to psychic visions. All of their training teaches them to look for what can be proven and demonstrated in a court of law, something that can be seen, felt, touched, even smelled. Psychics tend to “see” landmarks like “mountains” and “trees” and “water,” and Washington State is rife with all three.

Barbara Kubik-Patten’s precognition seemed to be more precise, but her timing was questionable. Was she simply “remembering” something that was now fairly common knowledge after a media blitz on the Green River cases? Or had she actually been at the location where the bodies of Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Marcia Chapman had been found?

Kubik-Patten called Dave Reichert and Detective Fae Brooks every few days with new insights and predictions, making herself a constant thorn in their sides and actually hampering them from doing their work. She herself became supremely frustrated when she felt they weren’t taking her seriously, which, in all truth, they weren’t. She was a nervous, intrusive presence when they needed every minute they had to follow up real tips and possible witnesses. Worse, she was probably contaminating possible witnesses’ memories as she planted herself on the Strip and began to play detective herself.

Kubik-Patten was particularly interested in solving Opal’s murder, feeling that she had a psychic connection to Opal. She was a frequent visitor at the Mills home, and conferred often with Robert Mills. Garrett Mills remembered her visits.

“She used to tape Melvyn, trying to trap him into saying something that would incriminate him. Then she would bring the tapes over and play them for my father. There were some awful things on those tapes, and I sometimes think that she forgot that she was playing them for a victim’s father. Finally, my father got mad at her and threw her out.”

Kubik-Patten told detectives she had learned that Opal had spent a few nights at the Economy Inn on S. 192nd and 28th Avenue South, a motel within walking distance of Angle Lake Park, where Opal had placed her last phone call—a collect call—to her mother on August 12.

When they followed up on that, the investigators found that Opal had never been registered there, although Cynthia “Cookie” Hinds had. Probably Opal had stayed overnight with her on occasion.

Like Melvyn Foster, Kubik-Patten appeared to crave attention, and she had an uncanny sense of when reporters might be visiting a site. Whenever something brought the media to the Green River’s banks, she was always there—watching and searching—and she was not averse to approaching and interrupting their coverage.

How Foster and Kubik-Patten met is a mystery, but they soon joined forces, making a curious couple who were rendezvousing not for romance but to discuss how they could solve the Green River murders.

Kubik-Patten became familiar to the media and thrived on that. One day in the fall of 1982, at the request of a writer-editor from a national magazine, I was at the Green River shoreline near where Wendy Coffield’s body had been discovered. Barbara Kubik-Patten appeared as if she had levitated from the thick reeds along the bank. She told the writer about her astounding knowledge that came from another level of consciousness, and was disappointed when he didn’t ask her to pose for the photographer who accompanied us.

Some time later, Barbara phoned and invited me to join her and Foster at the Ebb Tide for cocktail hour, curiously assuring me, “Melvyn won’t hurt you as long as I’m there.” I demurred.

Whether Foster was pumping Kubik-Patten for information, or she felt she was interrogating him while they sipped cocktails, they were a constant couple in the smoky lounge near the first body sites.

But by late fall 1982, Foster had had enough police attention. He announced that he no longer wanted to be involved in the Green River cases. He called reporters to issue more statements.

“I feel like I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide because I haven’t done anything,” he said angrily. “I think they are reacting to some substantial pressure on the cost of [my] surveillance. There have been no murders connected with the Green River mess in the last two and a half months, so why do they want to pull a second search of my house, outbuildings, and property? It’s beyond me.”

After their surveillance teams reported that Melvyn Foster was spending a great deal of time near the Green River, detectives had decided to undertake a more widespread search of his father’s house and property. With a search warrant, they removed several more items, including letters from Foster’s former wife and his new girlfriend in West Virginia, along with some nude photographs of two young Seattle women, neither of whom matched known Green River victims.

“Some guy who drives a hack mailed those to me last week,” Foster complained. “He was trying to frame me.”

The calendar on Melvyn Foster’s living room wall noted dates in July when he’d taken his car in for repairs, and detectives took that, too, along with some hair samples. Explorer Search and Rescue scouts and dogs searched the Fosters’ house and property in a wide range around it. They didn’t find anything that seemed to have evidentiary value, and they certainly didn’t turn up any bodies.

Still, Foster seemed hesitant to give up his status as a suspect, and the cachet that went with it, as he told reporters he had no knowledge of the slayings or the killer. “I would like to get my hands on the man who did [it],” he added, vehemently.

He hinted that he was thinking about hiring a lawyer because his civil rights had been violated by being watched constantly. He told reporters that he had prepared a six-page protest that he was sending to the F.B.I.

As Thanksgiving approached, with their two top suspects fading on them, there were only two detectives assigned to work full time on the Foster aspect of the Green River case. Six uniformed officers worked in teams around the clock, keeping track of Melvyn Foster’s comings and goings. But Dick Kraske admitted, “We can’t watch him for the rest of his life.”

Officially, Melvyn Foster’s visibility in the Green River investigation diminished until he was yesterday’s news, but Barbara Kubik-Patten was still convinced that she had the power to find the Green River Killer.

Dave Reichert, however, couldn’t let go of Foster as a suspect—too many things matched. He spent his own off-duty time checking on what Foster was up to, and often took the long drive to Olympia, which enraged the now-out-of-work cabdriver. Foster singled Reichert out as the detective he hated the most.

9

MELVYN FOSTER was right in focusing on Dave Reichert as an enemy. Although he had been in the Major Crimes Unit for less than two years in 1982, the young detective was relentless in his determination to catch the Green River Killer. Reichert tracked Foster, often taking time away from his wife and three small children to do so. In 1982, they were all under ten, and family meant a lot to Reichert.

Dave Reichert was the oldest of seven brothers. He was born in Minnesota, although his devoutly religious parents moved to Renton, Washington, a year later. His maternal grandfather was a Lutheran minister, and his father’s dad was a town marshal. Two of his brothers would grow up to be state troopers. The young detective attended Concordia Lutheran College in Portland, Oregon, on a small football scholarship. He met his wife, Julie, there and they eventually had three children: Angela, Tabitha, and Daniel. Reichert coached a grade school football team even before he and Julie had children. He and his family were familiar faces in their church.

Reichert had come close to losing his own life while on duty. Answering a call about a man holed up in a house, he had underestimated his dangerousness. The suspect sliced Reichert’s throat with a razor-sharp knife, barely missing the carotid artery on one side. If he had cut just a little deeper, Reichert could have bled to death.

Dave Reichert loved his job and he was full of energy at thirty-one. He believed devoutly that one day he would catch the Green River Killer. So did many other detectives and officers in the King County Sheriff’s Office.

It didn’t seem possible that one man, or even two men working together, could kill a half-dozen women and get away with it for long. Surely mistakes and missteps would be made, and they would have him.

AS THE CHANCE of connecting Melvyn Foster absolutely to the victims grew dimmer, any number of suspects bubbled to the surface of the investigators’ awareness that fall of 1982.

Kent had a disturbing case that began on October 5, a disappearance that had both similarities to and differences from the Green River victims. Geri Slough, twenty, left her Kent apartment early that morning to go to a job interview. Along with fifty other women, she had answered an ad that appeared in several south-end papers seeking a receptionist for a company called Comp Tec. Geri had circled the ad that listed a phone number and an address.

She was heading toward that address on 30th Avenue South to meet the company owner: “Carl Johnson.” He had sounded like a nice man on the phone, and had been encouraging about her chances of being hired.

But Geri Slough never returned to her apartment, and she didn’t call her friends to report on her interview. Her car turned up the next day in the Park-and-Ride lot just a block off the south end of the SeaTac Strip in Des Moines. Her purse and some of her bloody clothing were discovered in South Pierce County—almost on the Thurston County line. This location was some forty miles from where her car was abandoned, but in an almost straight line down the Pacific Highway.

Three days later, on October 14, a fisherman found Geri Slough’s body floating in Alder Lake. She had been shot in the head. Geri Slough had absolutely no connection to prostitution, and the manner of her murder was different from the strangled Green River victims, but her age matched and the location of her disappearance matched.

Kent detectives tracked down the address in the “Help Wanted” ad and found the Realtor who had rented the office space to the Comp Tec owner. Carl Johnson had leased this tiny office, but the phone he used was in a nearby phone booth. In the office, the investigators discovered a large section of carpet that was saturated with dried blood. The crime lab tested it and found it was Type A. Geri Slough had Type A blood.

That was all they could prove at the time. DNA identification lay in the future, and Type A is one of the most common blood types.

But the man who claimed to be “Carl Johnson” had come to the attention of police in another jurisdiction even before Geri Slough’s body surfaced. In reality, he was Charles Raymond Schickler, thirty-nine. A few days after Geri Slough disappeared, he was arrested by Kitsap County deputies in connection with an auto theft and break-in.

The car, a 1979 Grand Prix, was being checked by Washington State Patrol troopers after he appeared to know a great deal about the disappearance of Geri Slough.

It had apparently all been an elaborate plot to lure young women to Schickler. There was no Comp Tec. Although Schickler had no history of violence, he had been arrested for mail fraud. A dozen years earlier, he had used another alias to place an ad in a coin collectors’ magazine offering rare coins for sale. According to court records, he collected $6,000 but never delivered any coins.

Charles Schickler had long suffered from manic-depression, soaring from ebullient plans to bleak depression. Once, when he was in the manic phase of his disease, he had leased a huge space and installed fourteen phones for a business that was only in his head.

But Schickler, a former mental patient, would never answer questions about Geri Slough or anything else. Using a sheet, he hung himself in his cell in the county jail, without ever explaining what had happened after Geri Slough arrived at his “office.”

Geri Slough’s murder and the Green River murders shared headlines on western Washington newspapers for a few weeks, and then the Slough case disappeared.

But the Green River headlines continued.

Any time a murder is still unsolved within forty-eight hours of its discovery, the chances that it will be solved diminish in direct proportion to the time that passes. Now, the term serial murder was being used to refer to the Green River Killer, whoever he was.

With the press clamoring for more details, Dick Kraske gave them something—information that was already a rumor on the street. He said publicly that all six known “river” victims had died of “asphyxiation,” although he would not say whether it was by strangulation or suffocation, and turned away more questions by being somewhat inscrutable, “There are different ways of strangling people,” he said.

How many victims were there, really? There was no way of telling. If disappearances weren’t reported, no one would know to look for them. And almost all the girls who worked on the street had several names. They had a real name, and sometimes more than one real last name because a lot of them had come from broken homes with a series of stepfathers, and then they had more exotic-sounding street names.

In retrospect, there were far more missing women than anyone knew. Despite the reasons they chose not to live at home, many young working girls kept in close touch with their mothers or their sisters, calling at least once a week to allay their relatives’ fear, and as a kind of lifeline for themselves. But others flew free, far away from home and family.

With the holidays ahead, some families were bound to realize that a daughter hadn’t come home or even called. The detectives wondered if the killer was enjoying Thanksgiving and Christmas with friends or family, sitting down to turkey dinners and opening presents with a clear-eyed smile hiding what lay beneath his mask. Was he a wealthy businessman or an airline pilot who lived far away from the darkened, rain-puddled streets of the Pacific Highway? Was he even, as the predominant rumor among the lay public now said, a police officer himself?

I heard that rumor a hundred times. The killer was a rogue cop, someone the women knew—and either trusted or feared.

10

ALONG WITH FELLOW F.B.I. special agents Robert Ressler and Roy Hazelwood assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit, John Douglas was among the first to agree with Pierce Brooks that there was, indeed, a category of murderers who fit into a serial pattern. Someone taking victims one after another after another after another. There had to be a differentiation between mass murderers, spree killers, and serial killers. The early 1980s brought together the Green River Killer saga and the forensic psychology experts who understood the inner workings of aberrant and destructive personalities.

The B.S.U. had received accolades for its agents’ ability to formulate profiles of killers. They were no more blessed with psychic ability than most working detectives, but they had had the opportunity to interview any number of killers, evaluate their answers, compare them to known truths, and study the affect of their subjects. From there, they connected the psychological dots.

Their profiles were most useful in cases where police agencies around the United States needed second opinions. If they were already weighing the likelihood that one suspect among two or more was the guilty one, profiling often worked. The B.S.U. agents could say, “We think it’s this one.” It was more difficult for them to describe phantom killers from scratch; tests with multiple choice answers are easier than open-ended tests. And the Green River Killer was still a phantom.

In the first six months of the Green River Task Force, there were a number of suspects: Melvyn Foster, Max Tackley, John Norris Hanks, and possibly even Charles Schickler. John Douglas now used his experience and the information supplied to him by the Green River Task Force investigators to draw a profile.

Douglas began with his take on the victimology of the six known dead women. He deduced that all of them were either prostitutes or “street people.” Their ages and race hadn’t seemed to matter to the killer. It had been Douglas’s experience that even the savviest street people could be tricked or fooled.

He felt the lay public’s belief that the killer was a cop or someone impersonating a cop could be on target. Douglas said this was a common device used to reassure or intimidate potential victims. A badge or fake uniform could help someone accomplish his first goal—control over the girls on the street, whose lifestyle made them vulnerable. Calling them “victims of opportunity,” he said they were easy to approach; they often initiated conversation with potential johns.

The F.B.I. profiler sensed that one man was responsible for the death of all the victims, a man who wasn’t worried about being discovered at either the abduction or the body sites.

“Crime scene analysis,” Douglas continued, “reflects that your offender is comfortable at the crime scene location.”

Douglas believed that the killer felt no remorse over his crimes, and that he probably felt that the girls deserved to die. “He probably even feels he is providing a service to mankind.”

“The crime scene further reflects that your offender at this point in your investigation is not seeking power, recognition, or publicity. He is not displaying the victims after he kills them. He does not want his victims to be found, and if they are eventually found, he has the mental faculties to understand that items of evidentiary value will be more difficult to develop…if he disposes of victims in a body of water.”

Next came a more detailed description of a man with no name and no face—yet. It seemed to John Douglas that the man now referred to as the “GRK” had either worked, lived, hunted, or fished near the Green River area. Like most serial killers, he would be highly mobile, although he would be most likely to choose a conservative vehicle at least three years old. It was probably an ill-cared for van or a four-door car.

“Your offender has, in all probability, prior criminal or psychological history,” Douglas wrote. “He comes from a family background that included marital discourse [sic] between his mother and father. In all probability, he was raised by a single parent. His mother attempted to fill the role of both parents by inflicting severe physical as well as mental pain on [him]. She constantly nagged her son, particularly when he rebelled against all authority figures. He had difficulty in school, which caused him to probably drop out during his junior or senior year. He has average to slightly above average intelligence.”

The killer was probably attracted to women, but felt “burned” by them because they had spurned him or lied to him. “He believes he was fooled one too many times. In his way of thinking, women are no good and cannot be trusted. He feels women will prostitute themselves for whatever reason and when he sees women ‘openly’ prostituting themselves, it makes his blood boil.”

John Douglas believed the killer was drawn to the SeaTac Strip and its open prostitution because he had suffered a recent failure in a significant relationship with a woman in his life. It could well be that he had been dumped for another man.

“He seeks prostitutes because he is not the type of individual who can hustle women in a bar. He does not have any fancy ‘line’ as he is basically shy and has very strong personal feelings of his inadequacies. Having sex with these victims may be the initial aim for your subject, but when the conversation turns to ‘play for pay,’ this causes flashbacks in his memory of times past with other women. These memories are not pleasant. The straightforwardness of prostitutes is very threatening to him. They demonstrate too much power and control over him.”

The F.B.I. profiler felt the Green River Killer was “mentally comfortable” in killing prostitutes because of these feelings.

And what was he like in terms of appearance and lifestyle? Douglas pondered on that. “Your offender will be in relatively good physical shape. He will not be extremely thin or fat. He is somewhat of an outdoorsman. We would expect him to be in an occupation that requires more strength than skill, i.e., laborer, maintenance.”

He doubted that the GRK minded getting wet or dirty, because he was used to that from his job and/or his outdoor hobbies. “He will not be very meticulous, neat and/or obsessive-compulsive in his everyday lifestyle. He is a beer drinker and probably a smoker. Since these homicides, he has been doing both with more frequency.”

It was a precise description, yes, but you could go into any tavern and topless bar along the Strip and find several men who fit within its parameters. Scores of men fished along the Green River. Hundreds of local men hunted, drank beer, smoked, felt women had done them wrong, and drove dirty old cars. Where would the task force start?

Douglas guessed that the killer was Caucasian, somewhere between his midtwenties to early thirties, but cautioned against eliminating older subjects because there is no “burnout” with such murderers. “He will not stop killing until he is caught or moves from the area.”

Evaluating what profilers had learned from other serial killers, Douglas opined that he would not stay idle. “He is nocturnal and a cruiser. He feels comfortable during the evening hours. When stress at work or home increases, he cruises the area where the prostitutes are available.”

There was little doubt that the GRK revisited the river and other areas where he’d left his victims’ bodies, and it seemed likely that he was still contacting prostitutes, probably talking to them about the murders.

“He has followed newspaper accounts of these homicides and has clipped out some for posterity and for future fantasy and embellishment. If items belonging to victims are missing [i.e., jewelry], he will give them to the significant woman who is rooted to him—girlfriend, wife, mother.”

Although the Green River Killer had operated in his “comfort area,” Douglas felt that he was now having difficulty sleeping and was experiencing periods of anxiety, scanning newspaper accounts to see how thorough the investigators were. “He fears being detected.”

To ease that fear, the GRK might turn to alcohol, or even to religion.

In the Behavioral Science Unit’s experience, media coverage could have a profound effect on an unknown murderer. If the press stressed that the case had dead-ended and nothing was happening, the killer might feel he was “off the hook” and be able to cope very well with memories of his crimes.

Douglas suggested possible ways the media could help in flushing out the Green River Killer. If they mentioned how advances in forensic science and new techniques were helping to track him, he might well interject himself into the probe hoping to throw the detectives off.

A somewhat grisly suggestion from the profiler was to have the media give the location of cemeteries where the victims were buried. On a night when the Green River Killer couldn’t find a new victim, he might desecrate their graves.

Another ploy that sometimes worked was to create a “Super Cop Image.” The media could glorify one detective as an ultimate investigator assigned to the case. That man could give TV and newspaper reporters derisive quotes about the “demon” killer, while he painted the victims as angelic. This had worked in the past to draw a killer out of the shadows and into a dialogue with the top man.

There was another, opposite, possibility to consider. A psychologist or a well-liked reporter could give statements that the killer was the real victim, not the women of the streets. There would have to be a means for the killer to contact this sympathetic person who he felt would understand him.

What would entice one multiple murderer wouldn’t necessarily be effective with another. But there was a chance one of the schemes would work. The man the task force wanted to find might risk being identified and arrested, or he might be glorying in his success at duping the detectives who hadn’t caught him yet.

When—and if—the investigators had enough probable cause to execute another search warrant, John Douglas suggested that they take special care to take away scrapbooks, pornography, and any personal diaries they might find. Some killers papered their walls with newspaper clips about the murders they had committed, or kept macabre souvenirs and photographs, clothing, jewelry, even locks of hair. These things would be pure gold in a murder trial.

Historically, taking advice from the F.B.I. has often been difficult for local and state detectives, but communication got a lot better with the demise of J. Edgar Hoover. Special agents were no longer encouraged to appear above the crowd, and the exchange of information—once one-sided, with little being offered by “The Bureau”—was flowing more freely.

Even so, there remained a certain enmity. Sharp, old-fashioned cops with long experience at hitting the bricks and canvassing for information still came up with their own profiles, honed by their seat-of-the-

pants instincts. But the F.B.I. and the Green River Task Force were engaged in a war with an unknown killing machine. Anything that would help stop him and trap him was more important than personal egos.

With the wisdom that comes with hindsight, Douglas’s first profile would prove to be very accurate in some areas and totally off the mark in others.

THERE WERE, indeed, more working girls missing in King County than anyone yet realized. Although their names hadn’t yet appeared on an official “missing” list, something truly frightening was occurring.