And it was.
Dana’s mother-in-law was almost her exact opposite. Mary was a salesperson in the Men’s Department at the JCPenney store in Renton. She was a brunette in her late forties and always impeccably dressed with perfect accessories. Friends described her as “very well put together.” She took great pride in her managerial position in the JCPenney hierarchy.
Dana’s mother-in-law bought all of her husband’s clothes, just as she did for her sons. She always knew ahead of time about Penney’s sales and also used her employee discount. Although it rankled Dana, it only made sense for Mary to buy her husband’s clothing.
Mary didn’t approve of Dana, either. Her housekeeping wasn’t up to Mary’s standards, and she felt her daughter-in-law didn’t take very good care of Chad. He was a frail boy with reddish blond hair who always seemed to have a runny nose. He had inherited his father’s allergies and had to take medication for that, and he was so full of energy that he never put on any fat.
Dana wanted to have another baby, but her husband didn’t. As much as he loved Chad, he didn’t think they could afford to raise two children. He wanted Dana to have her tubes tied.
As the years passed Dana gained even more weight and she was miserable about that. Her husband didn’t complain much, but she knew he would like her to be slimmer. Finally, she broached the subject of having gastric bypass surgery. In the late seventies, it was a new procedure, almost experimental. But Dana wanted it, and finally he encouraged her to go ahead with the operation.
The gastric surgery worked spectacularly well—maybe too well. Within months, Dana went from plus sizes to a size 7. She had never worn clothes that small. She suddenly became a very attractive woman and men did double takes when they saw her. It made her husband a little nervous. He had never worried that she would leave him, but now she had a lot of men noticing her. “Guys started to come on to Dana,” Maryann said, “and she’d never had that happen before.
“Dana was working in Penney’s, too. Her mother-in-law got her the job. Even though they had their issues, Dana and her husband were always over there, visiting, and her mother-in-law babysat for Chad a lot.”
By this time Dana and her family had moved again. They had lived in three or four houses in the south end of King County, while the Hepburns stayed put. Their new place was on Star Lake Road. Like the Maple Valley Heights house, it was in a very secluded area, down at the dead end of a road.
During one of their shared meals—at the house on Star Lake Road—their hosts disappeared after dinner, leaving Maryann and her husband, Gil, in the house with the children. Their guests cleared the table and waited. It was quite a while before Dana walked in with a funny grin on her face. She pulled Maryann inside and whispered, “Bet you can’t guess what we just did?”
When her friend looked mystified, Dana laughed and told her that she and her husband had gone outside and made love—he liked it that way. Maryann thought privately that it wasn’t a very polite thing for the host and hostess to do, but she let it go. Dana was so happy with her new figure that she seemed years younger than she was, almost like she was having a delayed teenage time.
Both couples enjoyed country-western music and liked to go to a spot called The Beanery on the East Valley Highway near Kent. When Dana’s husband had to work nights, Gil Hepburn would drive Maryann, Dana, and a mutual friend, Diane, to the country-western bar.
“That’s when things started to go downhill in Dana’s marriage,” Maryann said. “Gil would dance with all three of us, and we had a good time at first. But then Dana started slipping out the back with some guy. She always told her husband that she was staying overnight at Diane’s house because it was too late to come home alone while he was working.”
It blew up when Dana’s husband called Diane’s house one night, asking for his wife. Told she wasn’t there—that she had never spent the night at Diane’s house—he was stunned. His comfortable, overweight wife who had done what Pastor ordained and wanted only to keep house and be a mother had turned into a femme fatale. When her baffled husband questioned her, Dana said that Diane was lying, that it was Gil who was cheating on Maryann, and they were all trying to cover it up. Dana also spent time at the Eagles’ Lodge, often coming home well after 2 AM, worrying her husband more.
By this time, Dana’s gastric bypass was working more than it was meant to. She wasn’t getting enough nutrients to survive and her weight plummeted. She had no choice but to have her alimentary canal reconnected. If she didn’t, she would die. Now her husband insisted that she have her tubes tied while she was under the anesthesia and she agreed. One child was enough.
But the marriage was destroyed. The man who had never fit in anywhere now had two wives who had betrayed him, and he couldn’t forgive either one of them. By the spring of 1981, their divorce was final. He would pay Dana child support, and have custody of Chad on weekends and some vacations. He resented giving Dana his hard-earned money. It made him furious.
He had come up in the world in his jobs and in buying more and more expensive houses, but he kept striking out with women. Prostitutes were easier than trying to pick up women and ask them for dates.
28
FROM THE BEGINNING of his stint as the Green River Task Force commander, Captain Frank Adamson acknowledged that he wasn’t a veteran homicide investigator. If there were people who could enhance the task force’s effectiveness with their expertise, he wanted to invite them on board. Bob Keppel was borrowed back from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Keppel, with his “Ted” Task Force experience and his ability to organize diverse information, could be both an important expediter and a somewhat cold critic. So be it.
The F.B.I. sent Gerald “Duke” Dietrich, who was a humorous and deceptively easygoing special agent in the San Francisco office of the Bureau. Dietrich was an expert on child abductions and homicide. He had once actually wired a tombstone with a tape recorder to trap the sexual ravings of a necrophile. He and his former partner, Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, had an enviable record of crime solving in California.
Adamson also contacted Chuck Wright, a Washington State Probation and Parole supervisor. Wright taught courses at Seattle University on violent offenders and sexual deviancy. Adamson was looking for someone inside the probation system who would be able to quickly evaluate suspects—who were now euphemistically called, “persons of interest.” Many of the men the task force was looking at had prior records. Wright’s background would be of tremendous help in searching the system for sexual offenders, and he could work with Adamson and Dr. Chris Harris, a forensic psychiatrist, as one more mind to try to understand the killer they were looking for.
Sheriff Vern Thomas asked Amos Reed, then head of the Department of Corrections, if the task force could “borrow” Chuck Wright to act as a liaison. Reed said, “Of course.”
“The first thing I saw on Frank Adamson’s bookshelf was the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” Wright remembered. “I had never seen a police officer who had that ‘cookbook’ to use as a tool—and not only did Adamson have it, he’d read it. We were both readers and we hit it off right away.”
Wright was allowed into the back room of the task force headquarters where the “body map” was kept, covered with a tarp so that no reporter might accidentally see it. “The map was punctured with an overwhelming number of colored pins. Each pin represented a body, and these seemingly endless colored beads took me aback. How could there be so many bodies and we normal citizens not even know this?”
Every body site had been videotaped. At first there had been sound on the tapes, but the officers who had to deal with the horrors they found often swore or used four-letter words to defuse their own feelings. Wright suggested, “We have to think there may be a jury one day who will see these tapes, and listen to your profanity, and that won’t help the prosecution.
“The sound was turned off,” he recalled.
br /> Chuck Wright saw how difficult it was to know what was evidence and what had simply been thrown away in trash piles: women’s underwear, cigarette butts, beer cans. To be safe, they took it all.
Despite the things he had seen during his many years as a probation officer, Wright had a number of unique experiences as he worked with the task force. As a winter sun set one night, he accompanied two plainclothes investigators into woods that grew darker with every step as the trees closed behind them. There had been a report that two bodies were hidden there. “It was pitch-black,” he recalled, “and I asked, ‘Aren’t you guys scared?’ and they whispered, ‘No,’ but when I turned around with my flashlight, I saw they both had their guns drawn—just in case.”
They walked a little farther into the “black hole.” “I took one more step and felt my foot go through some soft material, and my ankle and lower leg got wet with some warm liquid,” Wright said. “My heart stopped and my mind raced. I swore, too, ‘Oh shit! I just sank my foot into a body.’ But it was only a rotten log.”
One thing that impressed Wright was how concerned the King County officers were for the women on the street. “We parked on the SeaTac Strip, and we noticed a van pulling up ahead of us. The driver motioned to a young woman, and she walked over to the driver’s window so they could talk. In no time at all, she walked around and got into the passenger side, but before she did, she looked back and smiled at us. I was surprised, but the officer I was with just smiled back at her. When the van started up, so did our undercover car. We followed the van, staying well back, and stopped when it stopped. The deputy with me explained that they tried to watch johns and their dates to be sure the women were safe.
“After they finished, we followed the van back to the highway. When the girl got out, she looked back at us and we could tell by her body language that she was okay. At least for that moment in time, that girl was safe.”
The Pro-Active Team was developing rapport with the working girls as well as protecting them, and when they needed information about one of the men who picked them up, the women gave it. While the missing girls were very young and inexperienced for the most part, some prostitutes were streetwise and had learned to deal with the kinky demands of certain customers, including bondage and discipline, “water sports,” and necrophilia.
One aspect of necrophilia astonished Chuck Wright, who thought he had covered almost every perversion in the class he taught on sexual deviancy. Since they were investigating murders, the task force detectives talked to prostitutes who were willing to fulfill the truly grotesque fantasies of men who wanted to have sex with dead women. One “specialist” said she provided a room with a coffin, flickering candles, and mournful organ music. She powdered herself until she was as pale as milk, and actually inserted ice cubes into her vagina so she would seem to be a truly cold woman, the opposite of what most men might want. She said she made $500 for such a specialized performance.
Seattle police raided an escort service and arrested two men for promoting prostitution. In the evidence seized, they found index cards with the names, addresses, business connections, and personal preferences of their clients. Although most of that information would never be released, the list was culled for clients marked “dangerous,” and those with violent preferences were turned over to the Green River Task Force.
Such johns were added to the “persons of interest” list, and a few so-called respected citizens were shocked to be contacted by the detectives about their deepest secrets. But none of them could be linked to the Green River murders.
The women who made top dollar were the exception, of course. Wright remembered interviews with some of the families of the girls who had disappeared, many of them memorable because of the complete apathy he saw. “I was with two deputies who were trying to verify if a young teenage girl was ‘just’ missing or if she really was a Green River Killer victim,” he said. “When her father answered our knock, we walked into a house that was so messy that none of us sat down. The place was littered with beer cans, and cigarette smoke filled the room to the point that my eyes started to water. When one of the deputies asked him about his missing daughter, the man was very nonchalant. He said he had no idea where she was. When the deputy noted that she had been gone for over two months according to the report, the guy said he was surprised by the news. But he didn’t really seem surprised. Apparently, he was used to her not being around; he said he usually didn’t know where she was. She had ‘run off’ so often that he had just stopped being concerned about her whereabouts or welfare.
“When we got back in the squad car, we could only shake our heads. How could any father not know or even care about his daughter? Her case just had sadness built into it. We found out later that she was working the streets somewhere in California. At least she was alive and maybe in a better place than if she’d been in her dad’s household.”
Wright got to know the members of the task force well. He could see that some were “sprinters” who wanted to catch an infamous serial killer and do it now. “Others were highly trained long-distance runners—and that’s what Adamson needed, because it was clear it would be a long haul.”
No one could have known just how long.
Probably the most distinguished adviser to come on board the task force was Pierce Brooks. He was, of course, the investigative genius in America on serial murder. Although he already had his hands full launching VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, working with the F.B.I. in Quantico, and he was officially retired from law enforcement, Brooks had yet to slow down. He was in his early sixties and his health wasn’t the best; he had undergone delicate arterial surgery, and he would have dearly loved to spend his time with his wife, Joyce, in his home on the MacKenzie River east of Eugene, Oregon. Instead, he was constantly flying between Eugene; Quantico; Huntsville, Texas; and Seattle.
Brooks and I worked together on the VICAP task force, and, along with John Walsh, we had testified on the threat of serial murder in America at a U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing in early 1983. Senators Arlen Spector and Ted Kennedy were two members of the committee who seemed to agree with what we had to say.
Now Brooks came to Seattle to evaluate the ongoing Green River investigation. He spent two weeks perusing the staggering amount of information gathered thus far by the first two task forces. His recommendation was that the investigation must continue, with as large a team as possible. If catching this killer meant doubling the manpower, then it should be done. Every public record, F.I.R., tip, clue, or possible bit of information had to be gathered and fed into the computer system they had.
Going back to the first serial killer he himself ever hunted, albeit in a time when even he didn’t use the term, Brooks thought of Harvey Glatman, the so-called Lonely Hearts Killer. Glatman was a homely man with big ears who lived in a cheap apartment in Los Angeles. He didn’t appeal to the women he met through a Lonely Hearts club, and he’d killed one who rejected his advance and only wanted to go home. After that, he had lured victims in Los Angeles by pretending to be a professional photographer. He took photos of his naive victims, some where they were tied up and gagged, telling them he was shooting covers for fact-detective magazines. But then he drove the helpless young women to the desert where he strangled them, lingering afterward to shoot more pictures.
Glatman had taught Pierce Brooks a lot about murderers like the Green River Killer. “I don’t believe this killer selected the body disposal sites at random,” Brooks told Vern Thomas, Frank Adamson, and Bob Keppel. “If he did, he is the luckiest serial murderer of all time. He knows pretty well, or even exactly, where he will dispose of the victims before the murders occur.
“Just for the moment, let’s focus on four of the most prominent cluster sites: airport north, airport south, Star Lake, and the Green River. They are heavily wooded, somewhat concealed, and you think at first that this is an ideal location where someone would take anything to hide it—a body in this particular c
ase—anything valuable. In this case, it was the body that was valuable.”
Brooks knew what he was talking about. He explained that the bodies of the victims, and the killer’s relationship to them, was what gave him power. He needed the secrecy and the knowledge that only he knew where the poor dead girls waited for him.
“It is a very high risk situation,” he continued, “to go into an unknown area that is heavily wooded without knowing something about the location. I just do not believe that the killer went there with his victim the first time he had ever been there. I try to put myself in his position. Here I am a stranger in the area. If I want to dispose of a body and I’m driving down a nice, little winding hill and I have this body I want to get rid of, that would probably be the last place I would stop.”
A stranger wouldn’t know what was at the bottom of the hill, who might be approaching, or, in the case of an illegal trash dumping spot, if someone might drive up and catch him. No, he would have to be very familiar with where he went with a body. The Green River site—the first site—would have been especially iffy for someone unfamiliar with it. There were the fishermen along its banks, and local residents taking a shortcut home.
Brooks was positive that the killer either lived or worked nearby. He knew that stretch of river like he knew the back of his hand. He urged the task force detectives to learn who lived there, worked near there on a permanent basis, had worked there on a temporary project. Since the Green River victims had disappeared at various times of day and night, he suggested they check unions for work schedules, cab companies for their drivers’ locations and shifts, military records from the many bases around Seattle and Tacoma.