Green River, Running Red

  Years later, Dick Kraske would comment wryly that a lot of people probably believed that he had retired in 1984 when he left the Green River Task Force. But that wasn’t true at all. He would serve the King County Sheriff’s Office for another six years, some of his best years on the department, although he almost died from internal bleeding in 1985. Doctors could find no cause and he recovered. Anyone who ever worked on a serial murder task force could probably identify the cause easily enough. Ulcers, migraines, heart attacks, bad backs, accidents, and even cancer seem to stalk them.

  Over the years, this endless investigation would prove to be, quite literally, a man-killer.

  In November 1983, when Vern Thomas became the new sheriff, he brought in all those in command positions to discuss a battle plan for a second task force. Everyone agreed that they needed more money and more personnel. The transition wasn’t easy. Dick Kraske would have liked to stay with the hunt. An intense man, a stickler for details, Kraske had done a good job, but he and his detectives had not been able to catch the Green River Killer.

  In many ways, Kraske had been working at a disadvantage. The terrible scope of the murders was hidden at first, so in the first years, the Green River Task Force was inadequately staffed. The original task force had only five detectives, with three more detectives working other unsolved homicides in the sheriff’s office. The eight of them shared five cars. Their early-day Apple computer wasn’t backed up by a surge protector. It was 1982 and 1983. Most people didn’t know what a computer was, and were even less prepared for power surges.

  “We were told that absent a surge protector, the data that had been entered had been eliminated by a power surge most likely originating in the building’s elevator system,” Kraske recalled. “We were never able to catch up to organizing all the information we were receiving in a retrieval system that could have saved a lot of valuable time.”

  More than anything, it was the agony that everyone on every task force felt or would feel because they were failing to stop the man who kept killing and killing and killing. If he knew that the King County Sheriff’s Office was gearing up its efforts to catch him, the Green River Killer wasn’t in the least dissuaded from his grisly avocation. So far, he had walked away free. Even as Christmas lights twinkled on the huge fir tree outside the Southcenter Mall, he was prowling along the nearby streets that paralleled the I-5 Freeway.

  LISA LORRAINE YATES vanished two days before Christmas 1983. She was a very attractive nineteen-year-old with dark eyes, thick blond, wavy hair, and, despite her troubles, very much loved by her family. Her niece, Veronica, ten years younger than Lisa, thought her aunt was as lovely as a princess.

  “She was young and beautiful,” Veronica remembered, “gifted, loving, and funny. I thought she was so cool. She was killed when I was nine. And she was supposed to come pick me up right before she was murdered. She had promised me a winter picnic in the park and I was looking forward to that for such a long time.”

  Lisa had been shuttled around from home to home for much of her young life. She lived for a long time with her sister’s family, and Veronica thought of Lisa more as an older sister than an aunt.

  After that, Lisa lived by her wits.

  24

  FRANK ADAMSON was shocked to learn he would be the next commander of the Green River Task Force. Sheriff Vern Thomas told him that he would be reporting directly to him. That was fine with Adamson, and it would have made Kraske’s job a lot easier if he’d had the same direct line of communication.

  With seventeen years on the department, Adamson had worked in almost every unit in the King County Sheriff’s Office, although he had such a quiet mien that a lot of his fellow officers didn’t realize it. When Adamson became the lieutenant in charge of Special Investigations in Major Crimes, Lieutenant Frank Chase was in charge of Homicide in the unit. Chase had a remarkable memory for names and faces, and he was amazed when he realized how long Adamson had been on the department. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” he demanded.

  Adamson only grinned. He looked a little like Bob Newhart, only with much darker hair, and he had a similar sense of humor and low-key approach to problems. His outward appearance was always relaxed, no matter what might be churning beneath the surface. He was one of the smartest cops in the department and one of the best liked, managing even to head the Internal Investigations Unit without making enemies. In that position, Adamson knew a lot of in-house secrets about various officers, and was fully aware of the rumors that said the Green River Killer was a police officer.

  It was from Internal Investigations that he was summoned to the new task force. Adamson was, however, a contradiction—a cop who was an intellectual and whose wife, Jo, was a playwright. Adamson loved the poems of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke; he was a policeman who had once intended to be an attorney. Although he often walked away from crime scenes depressed by man’s inhumanity to man and the blind unfairness of tragedy, only Jo knew it. Adamson maintained a calm and capable facade.

  While most wives might moan at the thought of their husbands stepping into the powder keg that was the Green River investigation, Jo Adamson was pleased. She believed in her husband, and she herself was seething at the injustice dealt out to the victims. “I’m a feminist,” she told reporter Mike Barber of the Post-Intelligencer, “not a radical, but I get so angry at these women being killed. What it says about our culture—a man out there killing for his own perverted purpose.”

  The Adamsons lived in Maple Valley in a deep woods, and that helped smooth the edges of death and disaster that are cops’ frequent companions. They had a good marriage and they admired each other’s talents. Jo had had her plays produced and Frank was very proud of her. She was impressed with the honesty that was at his core. They had a teenage son, a number of big and fluffy cats, and collectors’ eyes for chiming clocks and wonderful sculpture. Like Kraske, Adamson, who was forty-one in 1983, had once been a marine.

  As the guard changed and an enthusiastic Adamson stepped in to run the task force, success seemed possible within months. He had forty detectives now, eight times what the first task force had, and they moved out of the dingy space between floors in the King County Courthouse to more spacious quarters in the Burien Precinct area, closer to the crime scene sites.

  This new task force also had a lot more money. Captain Mike Nault, who now oversaw the Major Crimes Unit, had given a figure to the new sheriff and the command force of how much money he thought the Green River investigation merited, and the powers that be doubled it. They now seemed to be in a win-win situation.

  Adamson accepted that his team had to begin by playing catch-up, reevaluating the information gleaned in the first eighteen months and moving forward. And as in any battle, the commander and the troops who now came to the front were fresh and confident. Those who were pulled back were battle weary. Dave Reichert, Bob LaMoria, Ben Colwell, Rupe Lettich, and Fae Brooks stayed with the fight. Adamson knew all too well that he, too, would have to deal with the media. The headlines were growing larger and the coverage of the Green River murders more frequent as the list of possible victims expanded.

  “I honestly thought,” Adamson remembered, “that because I had good people, we would have this thing solved within six months. In hindsight, I think we probably should have.”

  The second Green River Task Force had one senior deputy prosecutor assigned to work on the cases with them. Al Matthews joined the investigation in early 1984. He would remain with them until 1987.

  WHEN ADAMSON moved into his new job during the holiday season of 1983, Shawnda Summers, Yvonne Antosh, Connie Naon, Kelly Ware, Mary Bridget Meehan, and an unidentified body had been found. Many, many more women were missing, some of them victims who had yet to be reported.

  Five days before Christmas, 1983, Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s mother learned where her daughter was. And Frank Adamson had to deal with the first body found on his watch. It wasn’t really a body; it was only a skull.

&nbs
p; “We had a list of twelve women who were victims—known victims—and not all of them would turn out to be Green River victims,” Adamson recalled. “Then there was a list of missing women sent to us from the Seattle Police Department with twenty-two possibles on it. Most of them would be found and were, indeed, Green River cases. I was in Major Crimes only fifteen days when Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found in Mountain View Cemetery. She was one of those twenty-two, and she was one of the youngest of all. She was barely sixteen. That was shocking to me.”

  The small skull in the cemetery was found about eighteen miles southeast of the airport. It might well have been from the cemetery, a body unearthed by grave robbers and scattered. Vandals in cemeteries had struck often in the south county. The site was almost on the boundary line of the small town of Auburn. But it wasn’t a skull ripped from a grave. It was Kimi-Kai, found thirty miles from where she was last seen in downtown Seattle. It was out in the open, not in an overgrown wooded area where the other victims had been found.

  “We thought this killer was playing with us,” Adamson recalled, “when he put the skull right there. Some of the investigators thought that maybe it had been hidden and a coyote had carried it to where it was found.”

  He called in Search and Rescue volunteers to help look for more remains. “We went a hundred yards down an extremely steep grade, searching for more bones or clothing. It was so steep that we had to use fire truck ladders so Search and Rescue could maneuver on the hill. I was worried about the people searching—some of them were kids. Once, someone dislodged a rock and it almost hit one of the kids in the head.

  “But we found nothing at all. It was my choice not to go any farther down because it was just too dangerous. The hill went all the way down to Highway Eighteen.”

  Although they found no more of Kimi-Kai’s remains, a forensic dentist was able to match the teeth in the skull to her dental charts. Her mother heard the news without shock. She had accepted a long time before that Kimi was gone. With great sadness, she whispered, “She’s not hurting now. She’s not cold. She’s not hungry. She’s no longer in any kind of pain. That’s been tormenting me for the last nine months.”

  AS ADAMSON’S TASK FORCE moved forward, the investigators acknowledged that there were probably a lot more than a dozen victims of the Green River Killer. Adamson himself believed that. Had the killer’s favorite disposal site not been located with the finding of three bodies in the Green River in August of 1982, the man they sought probably would have left all of his victims there.

  But the new commander had prior experience with bodies left in water; gases formed by decomposition are so strong that he’d seen a body in an earlier case pop to the surface even though it was weighted down with a concrete block connected to chains.

  Adamson felt that both Wendy Coffield and Debra Bonner had originally been left in the secluded spot farther north up the Green River where the other three women were discovered. “But once we found them,” Adamson said, “he couldn’t go back there anymore, so he had to find new places to leave the bodies.”

  IN EARLY 1984, the first order of business was to be sure that all the information the new task force had and all that continued to come in was organized. “You’re overwhelmed with information,” Adamson recalled, “and it’s not very well organized. We redesigned the case file books so we could find things easily. We got the physical evidence together. We had one room with case binders listing the Missing, the Homicides, and the Physical Evidence.”

  In the early eighties, it was much more difficult to gather absolute physical evidence that will identify a murderer than it is now. Twenty-two years have made a tremendous difference. DNA matching was not a standard forensic tool then. Nor was the computerized Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) in general use. The F.B.I.’s old fingerprint system had grown archaic, depending mainly on time-consuming manual methods to match suspect ridges and loops and whorls to the fingerprints in its vast files.

  Before AFIS, it took two months for police departments to get reports back on prints submitted for matching in a normal request. Funds to complete the bureau’s goal of automation—thirteen years in the making—were not included in the national budget. The F.B.I. still needed $40 million to completely computerize its system, and Washington State was not yet set up to hook into it.

  In the beginning, the Green River Task Force used the Alaska fingerprint identification system. Tests on blood or other body fluids were pre-DNA. All criminalists could accomplish absolutely was to differentiate samples submitted as being from humans or from animal species. They could tell if the specimen had come from a secretor or a nonsecretor (meaning that a small percentage of humans do not “leak” their blood types in their body fluids). For subjects who were secretors, criminalists could determine their blood types. That seemed like a lot two decades ago.

  The one thing that was certain, and that had been certain since Dr. Edmond Locard of Lyon, France, directed the very first crime lab in the world, was his Exchange Principle. Formulated in the early years of the twentieth century, Locard’s theory became the basis for any investigation of any crime scene: Each criminal leaves something of himself at a crime scene, no matter how minute, and takes something of the crime scene away with him, even if it is infinitesimal. Every new generation of detectives—and television shows like CSI—works on Locard’s principle. But each decade brings with it more sophisticated tools to help the detectives find the minutiae that solves crimes.

  As the Green River investigation moved through the eighties, there would be many advances in forensic science. The earliest, however, required a good portion of each substance to be tested—hair, blood, semen, chemicals, paint, and so on—because the various lab processes would destroy the samples submitted.

  Even so, the second Green River Task Force was extremely optimistic in early 1984. Deluged with tips from the public, from prostitutes and street people, and from psychics, they investigated and cataloged all of them. However, they had to have a system to establish priority.

  “We had ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’ categories,” Adamson explained. “A’s had to be looked at as soon as possible, and they had to be eliminated conclusively before we moved on. B’s were people who might be good suspects, and we certainly needed to look at them, but we could take more time to get to them. C’s might possibly be suspects, but, with them, we didn’t have a lot to go on and we felt it wasn’t really important to get to them in the near future.”

  One of the problems Adamson tried to monitor was the natural tendency of detectives to fixate on one suspect, and one suspect only. Homicide detectives are human like anyone else and they aren’t infallible, although their job requires that they produce irrefutable evidence that a prosecutor can present to a jury.

  “I kept telling my staff that we had to remember not to get myopic,” Adamson said. “When a detective became too focused on a single suspect, I reminded him—or her—that all of us got ‘obsessed’ with certain people. One of us might be right, but all of us couldn’t be right.”

  Dave Reichert was still convinced that Melvyn Foster was the Green River Killer. Another detective was positive the killer was a Kent attorney whose clientele included a disproportionate number of women in the “vice trade.” The lawyer lived very close to where the first five bodies had been left in the river, and this suspect had once spent time in a California town where there were several unsolved murders of women.

  “I’d see that attorney, who was in his forties, occasionally,” Adamson said. “He was always immaculately dressed—not a hair out of place. I thought to myself, ‘No way is this guy gonna get in any river, get wet and dirty, and then show up in court.’ I’d been down to the river in my dress shoes, and a month later, you could still see the grime on them, and I didn’t get into the water. The real killer would have had to wade in there in the silt and mud.”

  The suspicious-acting attorney was later murdered by a disgruntled tenant in one of the s
habby apartment houses he owned.

  All of the investigators felt deeply, and it was tough for them to let go of their beliefs. There were just too many truly bizarre people who came to their attention. Even Adamson would soon have his own “favorite” suspect, just as they all did. Rather, he would have three preferred suspects. Some of the public didn’t care who the Green River Killer was. They demanded only an early arrest.

  Most of the time, all majors and above in the sheriff’s office were too busy with administrative duties to actually go out in the field, but each was required to perform “Command Duty” every few months. “I’d go out and check in with various precincts, respond to what was going on out in the county. And I used these times to drive by three guys’ places,” Adamson said. He wasn’t sure what he might see, and he really didn’t think he was going to be lucky enough to find them doing something incriminating just as he drove by, but he felt compelled to check on them.

  One of Adamson’s prime suspects was an older man a young prostitute had reported as a very peculiar “client.” She had agreed to meet the man at a motel on the highway, and he was quite a bit older than the usual johns. He’d seemed nice enough at first. He’d even taken her to the House of Values and told her she could buy whatever clothes she wanted. Then he took her to his house, which was close to the Green River. He owned a good-size property with many acres of land and a barn.

  But once the man—Ingmar Rasmussen*—took the girl into his house, he refused to take her back to the highway. He kept her there for a week, showing her a special police badge. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He proudly showed her his barn. With a sinking feeling, she saw that one area of the walls was plastered with pictures of women. He took pictures of her, too. She wondered if they were going to end up on the wall. Worse, she wondered where she might end up.