He was way behind his class, and now he even had trouble keeping up with kids who were younger. He was angry a lot of the time, but you couldn’t tell it by looking at him. He didn’t have any friends outside of school and he considered himself a “loner.” Nobody even cared enough about what he was doing to punish him. He could pretty much do what he wanted, and nobody told him not to—because they didn’t know.
He enjoyed hurting things, killing birds in the fruit trees in his backyard. But, then, so did his brothers. They shot at birds with their BB guns and laughed when they dropped to the ground. Sometimes they hit their targets and the birds flew away, but they flew crooked.
One day he was alone at home and he felt mad at everyone. One of their cats came up to him, wanting to be petted. But he was mad at the cat, too. He got an idea. His family camped out quite often and they had picnic coolers that shut down tight to keep the food inside cold as long as possible.
He grabbed the cat and forced it into the cooler, and then he shut the lid tightly. He made himself wait until the next day to look inside again. The cat was stiff, dead. It had clawed the inside of the cooler in its fight to get out, but someone would have to look closely at the hard white surface to see the scratches. He was pleased that it hadn’t been able to escape suffocation.
His anger sated, at least for the moment, he got rid of the cat’s body, although he claimed a long time later that he really couldn’t remember what he did with it. They lived on a busy road and cats were always getting killed. Maybe he threw it out there and figured nobody would know the difference. Maybe he buried it someplace or put it under a bush where the lower branches would hide it. After he got over his anger by hurting or killing something, he was always scared and hurried to cover up what he’d done so no one would know.
He washed out the cooler and put it back where he’d found it. He didn’t tell anyone about the cat, not even his brothers. He figured they had so many cats around that no one would ever notice.
He was thirteen or fourteen when he discovered that killing something made him feel strong and important. What more power could anyone have than deciding what was going to live and what was going to die? When people laughed at him, he had secrets now that they couldn’t guess.
He had carried a knife with him everywhere he went ever since he was in the sixth grade. It was black and had four blades that folded out of it. He liked the feel of it in his pocket.
Did he plan what he did? No, he was sure he hadn’t. He hadn’t planned to break all those windows at his school; it “just happened” when he picked up the first rock. He sometimes wondered why he did “bad things.”
Either the school or his mother made him see a psychologist after they found out that he’d broken so many windows again. He himself wasn’t sure why he had done it. One minute he wasn’t thinking about it, and the next minute he’d had a rock in his hand. And it felt good watching the glass shatter and fall to the ground. The psychologist tried to hypnotize him, but it didn’t work. He had too much control over his mind for that. His parents had to pay for what he’d done, and they were angry.
He was sure he wasn’t expecting to do anything to the little boy either. He was walking toward a dance at his junior high school that evening, and found himself in a lot where there were trees and bushes. When the six-year-old boy came by, he said he was surprised to find himself reaching out to pull him into the bushes. And then he had the knife out and open, or maybe he’d already had the blade exposed.
He stabbed the little boy just once, a quick jab that pierced the child’s kidney. When he pulled the knife out, there were gushes of blood. He felt ashamed for just a moment, but he walked away as if everything was normal.
And then he ran and hid in the basement again. He wasn’t afraid the boy was going to die; he was much more worried that he was going to live and be able to identify him. He stayed around his house for quite a while after that. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
Sometimes he wondered which bad things were worse. It almost seemed that they were worse when he got caught. If he didn’t get caught and wasn’t punished, he could make them go away in his head more easily. The kids at school knew that he was the one who broke the windows, and he suspected that some of them admired him for doing it, that they might have wanted to do it themselves sometimes.
But it might be different if they knew he was the one who stabbed the little boy, because they could think that it was a cowardly thing to do. What would people think of him for hurting a little kid? He might even have to go to reform school if people knew it was him. In the end, he was kind of proud that he didn’t get caught. But he was scared, too, of how much trouble he would be in if anyone found out. A teacher had found the little boy and carried him to a safe place where an ambulance and police were called. The boy lived but didn’t tell who had stabbed him because the child didn’t know. So no one found out and he didn’t get punished.
Bad things happening to people excited him. A little boy drowned in the public swimming area at Angle Lake while he was swimming there, and he thought about that a lot. He was really fascinated when a woman who lived near them was murdered, and he worked the details of what might have happened to her over and over in his head. It was on a hot summer night and she went for a walk around the block with only her bathrobe on—just to cool off. Somebody strangled her with the cord of her bathrobe.
He talked about that mystery a lot with his father. He thought she got raped, too, and he kept going over different scenarios. Maybe she had a fight with her husband because she spent too much or she was cheating on him. Maybe it was a neighbor or the woman’s secret lover or even two guys working together. There were many “maybes” to think about, and he was so clever at coming up with different motives and methods and suspects that he thought he would make a good detective.
15
THE PATTERN of abduction was moving south—down to S. 216th and Pac HiWay. Both Debra Bonner and Marie Malvar had vanished near the Three Bears, albeit months apart. And those of us who lived in Des Moines didn’t feel nearly as distanced from criminal violence as we once had, perhaps smugly sheltered in our little town that curved around Puget Sound.
Keli Kay McGinness was a striking blonde, a buxom eighteen-year-old with a heart-shaped face and blue eyes with a thick fringe of dark lashes. She divided her time between the Camp in Portland and the Strip in Seattle, sometimes even traveling to southern California. In the early summer of 1983, she and her boyfriend had left Portland to see how things were going in Seattle, hometown to both of them.
WHEN they worked Portland, Keli usually started on Union Avenue early in the evenings, and then moved to the downtown area around eleven PM. She was very self-assured and seemed older than she actually was. “She was at the top of the ladder of the girls on the street,” a woman who had worked in the Camp in the eighties remembered. “Keli wore this white rabbit-hair coat and I could never tell if she wore a wig or whether her hair was just bleached and she used lots of hair spray. She was really friendly with a girl named Pammy Avent, whose street name was ‘Annette.’ Keli had a lot of street names.”
My correspondent, who was a mature woman in a completely straight career when she contacted me, asked that her identity not be revealed as she looked back at the way the Camp was twenty years before. Of course, I assured her that it would not be.
“A lot of the girls were out there for the social aspect besides [being there] to make money—playing video games and visiting with each other at the Fun Center—but not Keli. She was focused on making money. She usually walked alone while the other girls walked in pairs. Keli had this strut and she stared into every car that passed her.”
The last time anyone who knew her remembered seeing Keli McGinness was at seven thirty PM on June 28, 1983, at the now-familiar corner of the Pac HiWay and S. 216th. That night she was wearing a tan short-sleeved sweater, blue jeans, a long camel-hair coat, and very high heels. The Three Bears Motel was on t
hat corner, and the desk clerk’s register showed that she checked in at ten PM.
Keli’s boyfriend reported her missing the next day, but Des Moines police detective sergeant Bob Fox wasn’t convinced that she had met with foul play. He had seen too many adults and older teenagers leave of their own accord. He told a reporter, “There’s no law against a person saying, ‘I’ve had it. I’m leaving.’ I just don’t know, and I don’t think we will know, until we hear from her one way or another.”
Keli was so attractive that people who saw her remembered her, but like Marie and Gail and so many girls before her, nobody along the Strip saw her.
THERE WERE OTHER CASES that might or might not be connected to the series of disappearances in 1983, and the murdered victims in the last half of 1982, enough cases that it set investigators’ teeth on edge, wondering just who might be out there, always alert to vulnerable females.
On July 9, 1983, King County patrol officers took a report from an eighteen-year-old secretary who had been violently raped. She was a classic victim: a little intoxicated, upset over an argument with her boyfriend, so upset that she stomped away from their table at Anthony’s Homeport restaurant at the Des Moines marina. She’d been served alcohol because she carried fake I.D. Crying and angry, she was in a phone booth calling friends for a ride home when a stranger in a pickup truck pulled over and asked if she needed a ride.
She shook her head and tried to pull the folding door closed, but the man grabbed her and forced her into his truck before she could react.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want,” he said, now oddly polite.
She gave him her boyfriend’s address in tony Three Tree Point, hoping against hope that she would spot him on his way home and he would save her. The driver followed her directions but he drove right by the address, ignoring her protests. He headed toward the small town of Burien, grabbing her hair in his fist and telling her he would kill her if she tried to escape. In Burien, he parked on the grounds of a boarded-up school and raped her. Fighting him, she was finally able to hit the door handle and tumble out of the truck. She ran, and a nearby resident responded to her frantic knocking.
Treated in a hospital’s emergency room, the frightened girl could tell officers only that the man told her his name was “John.”
“What did he look like?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was too dark.”
There was no suggestion that this victim was working the streets. She had simply been in the wrong place at the very wrong time. Her description of the pickup truck was similar to the trucks seen on Pac HiWay.
Keli McGinness’s last-known location was about two miles from the Des Moines marina. Two disturbing incidents nine days apart. Ironically, the articles about both eighteen-year-olds shared space on the front page of the Des Moines News.
ON MAY 8, 1983, King County detectives had quietly investigated the discovery of a woman’s body in a location some distance from the Green River and the Strip. The circumstances surrounding this body site were so bizarrely ritualistic that they had first thought it had to be an entirely different killer. And the investigators were scrupulous about not releasing full information on what they found. Should they encounter either the actual murderer or a compulsive confessor, only they and the true killer would know these details.
Carol Ann Christensen, twenty-two, was the single mother of a five-year-old daughter, and she’d been excited on May 3 because she had finally landed a job after a long time of looking for work. Carol Ann lived near the Pac HiWay, and she shopped there, on foot because she had no car—but she was definitely not a prostitute. Her new job was as a waitress at the Barn Door Tavern at 148th and the highway. It was close to the White Shutters, the restaurant/bar that attracted singles, and only two or three blocks from the small mobile home park where Carol Ann lived, close enough that she could walk to work.
CAROL ANN had worked only a day or two when she failed to come home one night. Her mother was frantic. Carol adored her little girl, Sarah, and would not have deliberately left her. If she could get home to Sarah, she would have.
The terrible answer to where Carol Ann had gone came within a few days. Carol Ann Christensen’s body was discovered in an area known as Maple Valley, which is about twenty miles east of the airport Strip. Much of Maple Valley would be built up in the next twenty years, but it was heavily wooded when Carol Ann disappeared. A family searching for edible mushrooms had to go only a short distance off the road into a shady patch of salal, ferns, and fir trees to find the precious morels and chanterelles bursting from the woods’ leafy floor.
They forgot all thoughts of mushroom-hunting when they came upon a grotesque tableau. A woman lay on her back in a half-sitting position, but they could not see her face. Someone had pulled a brown grocery bag over her head. Her hands were folded across her belly, and they were topped with ground sausage meat. Two dead trout, cleaned and gutted, lay vertically along her throat. A wine bottle that had once held Lambrusco had been placed across her lower abdomen.
This was a “staged scene,” not uncommon to sexual psychopaths. It is a way to taunt detectives, silently saying “Catch me! Catch me!” And at the same time, announcing, “Look at how clever I am, and you don’t even know who did this. You can’t catch me!”
Carol Ann wasn’t in the river, and she hadn’t been left close to the Pacific Highway. She was not a prostitute. Still, like the first Green River victims, she had been strangled by ligature, in her case with a bright yellow, braided plastic rope, which her killer had left behind.
She was fully clothed in jeans; a Seattle Seahawk shirt; a white, zippered, polyester jacket; and blue-and-gray running shoes. The grocery bag said “Larry’s Market” on it, the high-end supermarket located on the Strip.
Carol Ann Christensen’s murder was originally investigated by the Major Crimes Unit of the sheriff’s department, rather than the Green River Task Force, because both her lifestyle and the M.O. in her death were so different. Later, when her address and employment indicated she had lived and worked right in the kill zone, it was quite possible that she might well belong on the list with the other victims.
Although it is rare for serial killers—and by 1983, the Green River Killer was referred to that way—to murder someone they know personally, it is not unheard of. Carol Ann Christensen might have believed that she was going on a date, a picnic, with someone she knew and trusted. She was dressed for a picnic and the Maple Valley woods where she was found were pleasant in the spring. But even though her body was not that far from the road, the woods were dark and there weren’t that many people around. If the man she was with took off his deceptively friendly mask and began to hurt her, her screams for help would not have been heard.
Eventually, Carol Ann’s name went on the ever-growing list of possible victims of the Green River Killer.
It was fortunate that the King County investigators had followed their usual triangulation measurement routine in the Maple Valley woods. No one would recognize them now. They have become a sprawling neighborhood of modern homes called Patrick’s Faire.
There would be no more bizarre staged body sites. Whatever point the killer had wanted to make had evidently been accomplished. As Pierce Brooks always did, the task force investigators kept trying to put themselves into the mind of the killer, to think as he thought, to walk where he walked, but it was very, very difficult.
He didn’t think like anyone they could ever imagine. He wasn’t crazy, of that they were sure. If he was insane, he would have made some misstep by now, flipped out and done something to make them notice him. Instead, he was still playing his bizarre, malignant games.
16
ALTHOUGH her boyfriend insisted that Keli Kay McGinness would have contacted him if she was okay, out of all the young women who had disappeared, the task force and her own girlfriends figured that Keli had made it out safely. She had sometimes hinted that she might just change her lifestyle and go for something mo
re rarefied, and she had told her mother that if she ever really got out of Seattle, she wouldn’t be back.
She had the looks and the brains to accomplish that. And, surprisingly, Keli had the background that would let her slip easily into an upper-class milieu. Her whole life had been a study in contrasts. She’d grown up too fast, though, maybe because she had too many father figures, perhaps because she had gone from hard times to wealth and back again.
Keli’s birth parents were attractive, personable, and doing well financially. Her father was a handsome and garrulous car salesman, well known in the south end of King County, who earned good money. Her mother was a beautiful singer with high hopes of becoming a star.
In 1984, Elizabeth Rhodes, a Seattle Times reporter, did a remarkable reconstruction of Keli’s life. Rhodes, who is now the Times’s reigning expert on real estate, hasn’t forgotten the young woman she wrote about two decades ago: “Keli isn’t easy to forget,” she told me. “You have to wonder where she is now.”
Like my own daughter, Leslie, Keli was born in Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle. Keli would use many street names and many birthdates, but her real birthday was April 17, 1965, and if she is alive, Keli would be in her late thirties now.
Her parents’ union lasted until she was two and a half and her mother was twenty-seven. By accepting small gigs in local venues, Keli’s mother was able to support the two of them, and they grew very close. Like the popular song by Helen Reddy, Keli was one among many of the missing girls who had bonded early with their mothers—“You and Me Against the World.”
Two years later, Keli’s mother married an entrepreneur whose fortunes were soaring. He was more than willing to share his wealth with his bride and new stepdaughter. They all lived on Queen Anne Hill in a virtual mansion, a home that would cost well over two million dollars today. Keli Kay had sixteen rooms to romp through, and she could sit on a padded window seat and gaze through bay windows at downtown Seattle and the ferry boats on Puget Sound.