This had been a compelling series of murders in terms of sheer numbers, and it was rapidly becoming more weird.
31
HE WAS ENJOYING the media coverage. He loved the attention, having been underrated all his life by most people, including his parents.
By the early eighties, he had been cuckolded by two wives—both “the skinny blonde and the fat brunette,” even though he had joked about changing his luck by choosing different types of women to court. He had learned about prostitutes when he was in the service, but they had also betrayed him by giving him a venereal disease. As one acquaintance described him later, “He didn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer,” but he had learned a lot about social interaction. And he still had a robust sex drive, which required female partners. He’d been taught that masturbation was shameful.
He found a gold mine in an organization for divorced people with children, and he mined it skillfully. He dated a dozen or more women he met there. Darla Bryse* initially believed that meeting her new boyfriend at Parents Without Partners was serendipitous. In many ways, her life experiences were quite similar to the Green River Killer’s victims, just as they were much like those of his other girlfriends in PWP. She had suffered abuse and betrayal, but something in her still wanted to trust.
Born in Santa Rosa, California, to a housewife and a gas station owner–cum–construction worker, she remembered her childhood as being both loveless and frightening. “I was the oldest, and I knew I had two sisters,” she said, “but one went away. That’s about the only thing I remember before I was in first grade. My parents adopted my younger sister out to distant relatives.”
Although one of her grandmothers lived with them, Darla did most of the cooking and housework. Her parents had an active social life, belonging to lodges and clubs. They drank a good deal and had little time for parenting. “A man who was married to one of my mother’s friends abused me physically—sexually—and emotionally when I was very young,” Darla said. “I think my mother knew about it, but she never did anything.”
Darla never felt that she had much control over her life, although she acted out by being tough and starting a teenage gang. “I actually put razor blades in my hair,” she admitted. “But I was really just looking for someplace to belong, I think.”
Her first child was a boy, born out of wedlock. He was given to relatives. Darla wasn’t yet twenty when she married her first husband, Jimmy.* She was very much in love with him, and was thrilled when they married in January. She got pregnant right away and gave birth to a girl in October. She had another son within the following year. “I didn’t want to get pregnant again so soon,” she said. “I had two little kids under two and I had this compulsion about keeping my house absolutely clean, but Jimmy got drunk on Christmas Eve and even though I begged him not to, he just about raped me. And I knew right away that I’d be pregnant. I was.”
Darla couldn’t cope with three babies. When her baby son started screaming relentlessly one evening, she fought back a compulsion to throw him at the fireplace. “It was just luck that Jimmy came home early from work. I felt like I was out of my mind.”
She was suffering from postpartum depression, but it wasn’t an emotional disorder easily recognized in the sixties. Jimmy had her locked up in a state hospital for three months and quietly filed for divorce. “I was so naive and so dumb,” Darla recalled. “I didn’t want a divorce—I loved him—and I didn’t even know enough to get a lawyer. We were still going out once in a while and I thought we would be getting back together. And then my dad came to me and showed me a legal paper. Jimmy had been to court, and I didn’t even know that the divorce had gone that far. Jimmy got the house, the kids, everything….”
Jimmy began to date another woman and Darla couldn’t bear seeing them together. She left Santa Rosa and moved to Seattle with her sister. She was a very good-looking young woman and she got a job easily—as a dancer in a lesbian bar in the basement of the Smith Tower in Seattle’s Pioneer Square area. At that point in her life, she didn’t care about much of anything. “I learned about ‘Christmas trees’—dexadrine and blackberry flips,” she said of her introduction to drugs. “There was a gal who worked in the bar who got a crush on me, but I told her I wasn’t into that.”
Darla still missed Jimmy, and she went back to Santa Rosa as often as she could to visit her children, hoping that they could get back together. He seemed glad to see her and offered to rent an apartment for her. She visited her children, and sat by the phone in her apartment, waiting for Jimmy to come by. They were intimate again, and she believed that he still loved her. “I got pregnant again,” she remembered, shaking her head sadly. “I thought he’d be happy when I told him, but he said, ‘It’s not mine.’ And it was his. I hadn’t been with anyone but him.”
All of her life, Darla had been looking for love. Her ex-husband’s cruel response to what she thought would be joyful news threw her into the worst despair she had ever known. “I took Seconal and everything I could find that I’d bought over-the-counter, and I passed out, unconscious. I should have died, but my mother ran in unexpectedly. She was going to Mass and women had to cover their heads back then. She came to borrow a scarf from me, and she found me. And so my life was saved, and I was still pregnant. I thank God for that, now, because that baby girl is so important to me in my life.”
Because she had attempted suicide, Darla was once more committed to a state hospital. When she was finally released, she moved in with women friends, avoiding men for almost eight years. She had decided to put her baby girl up for adoption, feeling that she wasn’t an adequate mother. “But my best friend talked me out of it,” she said. “And we raised her together. I’m so grateful that I didn’t let Libby* go—she means the world to me.”
Darla moved back to Washington State and worked for the state and for public utility companies. She was an employment counselor for a while, and then an Avon Lady.
On her own again in her early thirties, Darla opted to have a tubal ligation. She had given birth to five children, and all but one were being raised by someone else. She wanted to date men again and she feared more pregnancies. Her sterilization gave her freedom she’d never had, and she went through a period of promiscuity. “I was drinking too much then, and I think I wanted to prove that I could satisfy a man, and I found that I could, even though I never had an orgasm myself. For the first time in my life, I was in charge in my relationships. It gave me a kind of power over men. I looked good, and they would just melt around me.”
Her flings with men lasted only six months, and she vowed to be a better mother to Libby. Her lifestyle changed dramatically from her days dancing in a lesbian bar and picking up men. Wanting a wholesome activity she could share with Libby, Darla joined Parents Without Partners in the late 1970s. She lived in West Seattle, and she attended group activities designed to help single mothers and fathers cope with parenthood and still maintain some kind of social life. Most of the group members lived in the south part of King County.
“We met in people’s homes for discussions, had potluck dinners, or went to dances at the Kent Commons,” Darla recalled. “Libby and I went on a lot of hikes and campouts with PWP. I was still drinking then, but we made a lot of friends and it was healthy for both of us to be exercising in the outdoors and up on the mountain trails. They were a good bunch of people.
“That’s where I met him—at Parents Without Partners.”
Darla had noticed the twice-divorced single father at other PWP functions and found him attractive, but he was living with another woman in the group. He had his son, seven-year-old Chad, on weekends and brought the boy to most of the picnics and hikes. He was obviously very proud of the little boy, who lived with his mother, Dana, during the week. He and Darla often signed up for the same activities where children were welcome so they could include Chad and twelve-year-old Libby.
One weekend, the group was hiking on trails in the Snoqualmie Pass foothills near Is
saquah, and Darla found herself studying him. She thought he was quite good-looking, and muscular. He was about thirty, younger than she was by five years. “We found ourselves alone on the trail and we started talking. I found him very personable, and he was funny in a quiet way because he was pretty reserved. We both realized that we sort of hit it off, but he was still living with someone else so it wasn’t going to go anywhere.”
One evening that changed. “I started flirting with him, and he responded to me,” Darla remembered. “I came right out and let him know that I was interested in him. It wasn’t long before he broke up with the other gal. He moved out of her house, and moved right in with me. Just like that. That was in May 1981.”
He paid his share of the household expenses, and although he didn’t help her clean house, he did do yard work. Darla found him to be a very gentle man, although he wasn’t particularly sentimental. “I can’t remember that he ever brought me gifts, but I think he bought me a couple of cards.”
They didn’t have a lot in common. He never read books, and Darla was a reader, especially fascinated by true-crime books. She had read True Detective magazine from the time she was in junior high school. As far as she knew, he didn’t read them. He wasn’t interested in movies, but they watched television together in the evenings. Outside of PWP, he had very few friends, although he was close to one of his brothers. He often took Darla to visit his parents who lived a few blocks from Pac HiWay.
Although he had few interests, Darla found him to be an exceptional sexual partner. “I’d say his hobby was sex,” she recalled. “He wanted to make love at least three times a day.”
She didn’t object to that, although she was a bit embarrassed at first by his desire to have sex out of doors, in his car, or in places where they could easily be discovered. At the time, he was driving a burgundy truck with a white canopy, and he always kept a blanket in the cab in case they came upon an interesting trysting spot.
“I got so it didn’t bother me to have sex outside,” Darla said with a laugh. “One time we were camping near the Yakima River and we were making out on the bank and a canoe full of people came paddling by and saw us. They laughed and waved at us, and we waved back. By then, I felt so comfortable and so uninhibited with him that it didn’t faze me.”
Darla sometimes took his lunch to him where he worked. They often slipped into one of the huge semi trucks parked there to have sex in the cab’s sleeping area behind the driver’s seat. Nobody ever caught them.
He kept pushing the parameters of danger. He liked the Southcenter Mall area. Darla didn’t mind having sex in his truck in the Levitz Furniture Store parking lot, but she was very nervous when he told her he’d found a new spot. “There was this place where men were loading trucks at Southcenter,” she remembered. “There was a cement barrier, some kind of fence about ten feet long and fairly close to the ground. He insisted that we have sex on the grass right on the other side of that fence and I could hear the men working only a few feet away. They could have looked over and seen us, but he wasn’t worried about that.”
He was a passionate outdoorsman and he loved to camp and fish, although Darla couldn’t recall that he ever brought home any fish. Between them, they had collected all kinds of camping gear—tents, cooking grills, sleeping bags, and anything else they needed. Often, they camped for a week in the wilderness. Wearing nothing but a thin towel because he liked her naked, Darla cooked their meals on the outside stove.
Besides fishing, he liked to dig for old bottles alongside deserted railroad tracks. He drank very little and didn’t smoke. He seemed to her to be a perfect mate. “He was neat and clean and considerate. He was very, very muscular—very strong.”
They were completely open with each other in their discussions about sex, admitting fantasies they had. Both of them were experienced with any number of partners, although, as far as Darla knew, he was faithful to her while they lived together.
Once, when they were camping without their children in the Cle Elum wilderness in the Wenatchee National Forest, they agreed to try some bondage sex. Darla didn’t object to being tied to a tree or even to being “staked out” on the ground with her wrists and ankles bound, “as long as it was safe.”
He was excited about that, and even embroidered upon the basic concept by placing grapes and other fruit inside her vagina while she was helpless. They both found the innovative intercourse exciting, and he kept his promise not to hurt her. Theirs was certainly not an average relationship, but they were adults and it was nobody else’s business.
There were, however, aspects of this man that troubled Darla. He never told her he loved her in so many words. She would have liked that, but if she had to ask him to say it, it wouldn’t mean anything. More troubling for her, he wanted to go back to court and gain full-time custody of his son, Chad. “Chad was a good kid,” Darla said, “but he was hyperactive, and I didn’t think I could take having him around all the time.”
As her lover became more enthusiastic about getting custody of his son, Darla came to a decision. “I remember when I told him that I had to break up with him. It was close to Christmas in 1981. We were in our bedroom and I was sitting on the floor while he sat on the end of the bed. I told him that I could not emotionally handle raising Chad full time. I had four of my own children who weren’t with me, and I just couldn’t take on Chad.”
His head lifted and he stared at her, surprised. “And you never tell me you love me,” she added.
His eyes filled with tears. “But I do love you,” he said.
“I told him it was just too late to tell me at that point. He felt bad, I know, but he wasn’t angry. He moved out of my house and we broke up, but we were still friends.”
After he left, Darla’s daughter Libby told her that there was something about him that gave her “the willies.” She denied that he had ever molested her or said anything improper, but he had once come to her room to talk with her, and she just felt as if something was wrong. Darla was baffled; she had never known him to be anything but considerate and easy to get along with. She knew that Libby would have told her if he had made any untoward moves on her.
Early in 1982, he called Darla to say he’d bought himself a house in Des Moines, close to Pac HiWay. It was a small rambler. He was very proud of it, and he invited Darla and one of her girlfriends to a big housewarming party he was having. He’d also asked people he worked with and other PWP members.
“When we got there,” Darla said, “he had refreshments laid out and his house was all cleaned up. But no one else came to his party. I felt sorry for him, and we stayed and tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, but I could see he was hurt. He showed us through his house and his backyard. I remember there were two big fir trees out in his backyard. Every time I drove on I-5 after that, I could spot his house by looking up at those trees.” She recalled his backyard ended in a bank that dropped to the shoulder of I-5, the interstate freeway. The roar of the constant traffic on the freeway sounded like an ocean in a storm.
The only time Darla ever saw him show any anger was after their breakup. When his housewarming celebration was such a debacle, he invited her and Libby to dinner. She asked if Libby could bring a girlfriend, and he said that was okay. “Libby was just in her teens and you know how silly girls can be at that age,” Darla recalled. “For some reason she and her girlfriend got the giggles at the dinner table. I told them to settle down because he had gone to a lot of trouble to fix dinner for us, but they just had to look at each other and they giggled harder.
“Well, he got furious. He really lost it. I’d never seen him even get a little angry before. I don’t know if he thought they were laughing at him or what, but he shouted at them. He scared Libby. And we never went back to his house after that.”
It wasn’t long after that unfortunate dinner that Darla’s ex started dating another woman from PWP—Trish Long.* Darla heard a rumor about six months later that he had contracted the herpes virus and she
considered herself lucky to have avoided that. Even so, she remembered him as a nice guy and wished him well. She had made some mistakes in her life, but she didn’t consider him to be one of them. Within five years, Darla met a man she would marry. She didn’t expect that she would hear much about her old boyfriend after 1981. They had begun to move in different worlds.
32
IN MID-MAY 1984, there was a respite for the task force, and for the women who strolled the highway, always looking over their shoulders, always asking johns, “Are you sure you’re not the Green River Killer?” And those who asked should have known he wouldn’t tell them the truth, if he was.
At least, no new disappearances had been reported, but that didn’t mean much. Frank Adamson had feared that the Green River Killer might continue his pattern of numerous abductions and murders in April through October, and the task force detectives girded up for more trouble, even as they kept the Pro-Active Team on the highway with decoys and vigilance. The silence made all of them nervous. Where was their “warm weather killer”?
Parents who had waited for some word of their missing daughters lived anxious day by anxious day, tensing every time their phones rang. Almost a year had gone by since Judy DeLeone’s co-worker was absolutely sure that he had seen her daughter, Carrie Rois, alive and well at Seward Park in Seattle. She had even come up to him and said, “Remember me? I’m Carrie—and you work with my mom.”
Judy sank so deeply into depression that Randy Mullinax and Linda Barker, president of Friends and Families of Victims of Violent Crime, a support group active in the Seattle area for more than a decade, called Mertie Winston, whose daughter Tracy had been missing since the previous September. They suggested that the two women talk. Linda was afraid that Judy was suicidal.