Green River, Running Red

  “I didn’t know what I could do,” Mertie remembered, “but I agreed to call her. I began by saying ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ We ended up talking for three straight hours. I’d been baking cookies when Linda called and asked me to call Judy. I ended up burning at least three batches of cookies because Judy and I got so involved in talking. We were among the few people who could understand what all the parents were going through. Judy and I began to bolster each other up. We came to a place where we believed our daughters were together, that whatever had become of one had happened to the other. You search for ways to be optimistic, and we told ourselves that both Carrie and Tracy were alive and that they were okay and they would be coming home again.”

  ON MAY 7, 1984, the Green River Task Force investigated the murder of a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Kathy Arita whose body was found near Lake Fenwick. The location was right—she was only a half mile or so from the Green River—but nothing else matched. She was a Boeing employee, missing for three days, and the mother of a seventeen-year-old son. Her body was fully clothed when she was found. She was quickly eliminated as a Green River Killer victim. There would be a number of other women killed in the same general area over the years ahead, each to be investigated as a possible GRK case. However, they proved to be unconnected, part of a predictable homicide rate in Seattle and King County—normal. No, no one can call any murder normal.

  While the violence against the SeaTac Strip teenagers seemed to be, at the very least, on hiatus, there were serial rapists and killers active in other areas, and task force investigators from King County traveled all over the United States to confer with detectives in other jurisdictions: Anchorage, Alaska (where baker Robert Hansen admitted to killing seventeen women over the previous decade, hunting some of them with his bow and arrow. Human beings were only “game” to him); in Los Angeles, a freelance television cameraman, once a suspect in four rapes in Seattle, was charged with three California slayings.

  Every time a spate of serial murders of women erupted—and they seemed to be increasing in the U.S.—the Green River detectives wondered if it might be their man who had moved on. If he had, he had left much tragedy behind to be discovered. On May 9, the M.E.’s head investigator, Bill Haglund, confirmed that the bones found near Enumclaw off Highway 410 were those of Debora May Abernathy, the transplant from Waco, Texas, who would never have willingly left her little boy behind.

  Oddly, a man walking near the intersection of Highway 18 and State Route 167, many miles away from where Debora’s body was left, found her Texas driver’s license about ten feet off the shoulder of the road. Detectives who searched the area three months later discovered her son’s birth certificate. Her killer had either accidentally or deliberately flung her documents from his vehicle. It was more likely that he did it on purpose to rid himself of any connection to the corpse he had hidden in the wilderness.

  When her mother was notified that Debora was dead, she commented sadly, “She used to be a real nice girl.”

  I REMEMBER being interviewed about the Green River Killer and serial murderers in general by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle that May of 1984. I wasn’t in Seattle; I was in Eugene, Oregon, attending Diane Downs’s trial for the murder of one of her children and attempted murders of two others. I saved the resultant article by Susan Sward and Edward Iwata because it included coverage of the Green River murders—the first time, really, that anyone in the media outside Seattle acknowledged that they were occurring. That newspaper is yellowed and crackling dry now, its edges crumbling as I fold it out.

  It seems strange to read my own comments to Iwata as I gave my thoughts on who the Green River Killer might be and what drove him: “[He] either possesses superior intelligence, or he’s so streetwise or con-wise that he makes up for whatever [lack of] intelligence he might have…. The antisocial personality always sounds sincere. The facade is absolutely perfect.”

  In the same article, F.B.I. special agent Bob Ressler commented, “Most of these people are very, very human. The majority are normal in appearance and conversation, and certainly not insane or bizarre. They’re not strapped in chains or straitjackets, and that’s what makes them so dangerous.”

  The media coverage was accelerating, not just in western Washington and Portland, Oregon, but spreading into other states. Finally, on May 23, 1984, Frank Adamson and the rest of the task force got a much-needed right arm, a smart and gracious media spokesperson: Fae Brooks. Fae knew the Green River cases as well as anyone. She and Dave Reichert had worked on them in the very beginning. As the media liaison, she could tactfully stonewall the press without ever ruffling reporters’ feathers.

  Fae Brooks had joined the King County Sheriff’s Office in 1978 as a patrol officer, the realization of a longtime ambition. She had once been a legal secretary, but her uncle was assistant chief of police in Washington, D.C., and she wanted to be a cop, too. She began on patrol out of the Burien Precinct, which now housed the Green River Task Force, and quickly moved up to be a detective in the Sexual Assault Unit. Brooks had been a recruiter for the department, too. She dismissed any thought that it was difficult for a woman, an African American at that, to go up through the ranks. “As long as you are a competent officer, it doesn’t make any difference who you are.”

  She would prove that—and then some—over the years, moving up through the ranks.

  ON MAY 26, reporters would clamor again for information. More bones had been found, this time near Jovita Boulevard, not in King County, but five blocks into Pierce County. The skull still had metal orthodontic braces on its teeth. Colleen Brockman, fifteen, who had believed that the men who picked her up on the SeaTac HiWay and sometimes took her out to dinner really cared for her, had lain for a year and a half undiscovered. The fate that her friend “Bunny” had feared had caught up with Colleen.

  By June 16, 1984, the official toll of Green River victims was twenty-six. Eighteen of them identified; the rest only bones.

  Tracy Winston was still missing, along with Kase Ann Lee, Debra Lorraine Estes, Denise Darcel Bush, Tina “Star” Tomson/ Kim Nelson, Shirley Sherrill, Becky Marrero, Mary Bello, Carrie Rois, Patricia Osborn, Marie Malvar, April Buttram, Pammy Avent, Mary Exzetta West, Keli Kay McGinness, Martina Authorlee, and Cindy Ann Smith. Maybe some of the unidentified bones would prove to be those of the missing. Perhaps not.

  And, almost certainly, there were young women missing who had never been reported, girls who either had no close relatives and associates or who were believed to be living somewhere else or traveling.

  There were new tips coming in, and some unresolved suspicions about prior suspects. In July 1984, Melvyn Foster told reporters that investigators had given him a “ride” to Seattle from his Lacey home, bought him lunch, and spent several hours showing him pictures of dozens of women and asking him questions. “It was all quite civilized,” he commented with aplomb. He had been happy to share his experience and knowledge with them. He appeared to be somewhat pleased that the task force detectives had failed to arrest a viable suspect.

  Foster bragged to Barbara Kubik-Patten that he and Dave Reichert were now “good buddies,” and that Reichert was going to show him all the dump sites. He still had a kind of love/hate relationship with the police. Foster wanted very much to be part of law enforcement, and continued to offer his services as a “consultant” to any department that would listen to him. His father’s home was in Thurston County, so he went to Neil McClanahan and Mark Curtis, high-ranking detectives in the sheriff’s office, and offered to help them “clean up prostitution” in Olympia, Washington’s state capital. One place he suggested they investigate was the “Roman Bath,” where he said he himself had had sex with women. Curtis and McClanahan checked with King County on Foster’s status and were told to go ahead and listen to Foster if they wanted to.

  He would soon be cleared by the Green River Task Force of any guilty knowledge in their cases, finally omitted from the suspect roster du
ring Frank Adamson’s command.

  “We bought Mel’s car for $1,200 and processed it to the nth degree—even using the F.B.I.’s criminalists,” Adamson recalled, “but we found nothing. There was a handprint on the trunk of his car, a small print, and we wondered if it was from a small female or a child. It was from his daughter. We cleared him because we were so thorough in searching his vehicle.”

  Every so often, Foster would get into trouble with the law, usually a scuffle of some sort. Once, he pulled a knife on a driver who cut him off in traffic. Still, he faded rapidly from the headlines, no longer “a person of interest.”

  Wendy Coffield’s parents sued the State of Washington for negligence in not keeping careful enough track of her. They had hoped that she would be incarcerated for several years so that she might have a safer environment, and they were angry that she had been released to a facility without bars and locked doors. In the end, their suit went nowhere.

  ON SATURDAY, July 31, 1984, I received a phone call from a man named Randy who said he lived in San Francisco with his grandmother. He said he’d read The Stranger Beside Me and decided to call me about two men he’d met in jail: Richard Carbone and Robert Matthias. Randy said he was quite sure they had killed at least some of the Green River victims, and they had also told him they had robbed a bank in Seattle. He gave me very detailed descriptions of Matthias and Carbone, right down to their prison tattoos. He was frustrated because he said he had called the task force and left a message for Bob Gebo, a Seattle police homicide detective on loan to the Green River investigation, and he hadn’t yet heard back. I explained how many leads the task force investigators had to follow and that I was sure Gebo would get back to him when he could.

  Three days later, I heard from Matthias himself. He said Randy had given him my number. He claimed to be afraid that his life would be in danger on any trip back to Seattle with detectives. I told him not to worry; I’d relayed his message and been told that Detective Paul Smith of the task force would be coming to San Francisco to talk to him.

  Matthias called me several times, telling me about his dysfunctional childhood, and then he confessed to killing some of the Green River victims. But he broke into tears when I tried to pin him down about dates, seasons, and locations around Seattle. I’ll admit I almost bought his story at first, because he was very, very, convincing. “Tell me something,” I said, “because I’m curious. If you are involved in the situation up here, you would have either had to be very good-looking, drive a really nice car, or have a great gift of gab, because the girls were so frightened they wouldn’t get in a car with just anyone.”

  “Two out of three,” he said. “I don’t like to brag, but I’m good-looking. I appear to be very, very nice. I can get people to trust me and feel comfortable with me in the first five minutes I talk to them. It’s mainly the way I talk. I sound very naive when I want to. My tattoos throw them off sometimes, though, and I have to talk faster.”

  I didn’t really trust Matthias, but he knew enough about the Green River cases for me to keep up a dialogue with him. Still, it was becoming obvious to me that he wanted to learn more from me than he wanted to tell me the truth. I deliberately avoided giving him any locations or information about the victims. Matthias thought they had all been pretty brunettes, and I let him think that. He was wrong about the manner of death, too. He mentioned using a gun, and said they had been beaten and cut, as well as strangled.

  A half hour later, Richard Carbone called, or he said he was Carbone. His voice sounded remarkably like Matthias’s. Either only one of the two prisoners was making the calls, or their voices and “confessions” had been rehearsed. Carbone, however, claimed that he and Matthias had killed women in three states—Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. “We put the girls in the trunk of whatever car we’d stolen last, and then we left them.”

  Like Matthias, he was worried about the trip back to Seattle if they were extradited from California, and he wanted me to assure him they would be safe. Would I come along as an extra witness? He voiced his concerns that they would be deluged by the press and “fans when we’re brought to Seattle and it hits the papers. There are a lot of sick people out there,” he pointed out piously, “who get off on associating with people like us.”

  As I look at the eighteen, single-spaced, pages I typed out on Matthias’s and Carbone’s calls and then sent to Detective Bob Gebo, I realize I must have bought their stories enough to listen to them that long. But, as Matthias said, he had “a great gift of gab.”

  Paul Smith, Ed Streidinger (also on loan from the Seattle homicide unit), and Randy Mullinax flew to San Francisco to question Carbone and Matthias. They questioned them separately, of course. One said he’d killed eleven, and the other thought they must have killed sixteen. They were clearly blowing smoke.

  Mullinax had counseled many victims’ families and seen their grief and terror. His was a solid shoulder they could count on, and he told a lot of mothers that they could call on him whenever they needed to ask questions or just to talk. Now, he looked with loathing at the man who sat across from him because he knew he was lying; Matthias had his facts wrong. The usually taciturn detective reached across the table and grabbed the glib prisoner by the collar. “Listen, you S.O.B.,” Mullinax said. “There are families out there dying, waiting to hear about their daughters. Don’t you dare play with their hopes and emotions.”

  Both men admitted that they had lied about the whole thing. They figured it would be a good way to escape, expecting that they would be extradited to Seattle, guarded by only one detective apiece. Their plan called for one of them to create a distraction while the other stole the handcuff keys.

  When Randy Mullinax told Mertie Winston about it later, he laughed that the pair was so dumb, they didn’t realize they would each have had three or more guards, and they had never considered that they would have been in leg irons, too.

  Mertie could tell that Mullinax would almost have welcomed the jerks making a move to escape. She bought Randy a plaque that said “Make My Day” and he quickly hung it over his desk at task force headquarters.

  The investigation had been going on for a long time, and most of the families knew how hard the detectives were working, how emotionally invested they were. But there were a few parents who complained. They tended to be the ones who hadn’t really looked after their daughters in the first place.

  Mertie Winston and Randy Mullinax had grown up in the same general neighborhood in the south end, although they’d never met. She knew about his family, and he always asked about her boys. She knew that he would call her if there was any news at all about Tracy. Dave Reichert, too, seemed to care a lot about the families who waited, their agony almost more than they could bear. Some of the task force investigators admitted that they had to stay detached emotionally. There was just too much cumulative pain among the families and they felt they couldn’t do their jobs if they allowed themselves to be caught in it.

  “I used to take chocolate chip cookies down to the task force when they were headquartered in the old junior high school,” Mertie said. “But it was difficult for me because that was the same school Tracy had gone to when things were so different. I had to pass close to her homeroom, and I heard the same bells ringing when classes changed. I couldn’t stay very long. I wasn’t comfortable in that school. It brought back too many memories.”

  Citizens and politicos grew restive with the expense of keeping a task force intact when it hadn’t yet arrested a suspect. It wasn’t turning out the way it did on television shows.

  There was talk that the task force might be cut back in both personnel and funds. Thus far, the King County budget had had almost $2 million sliced out of it to fund the Green River investigation, and some felt that wasn’t politically correct, not when there hadn’t been any positive results in more than two years. Sheriff Vern Thomas explained that it was too early in the game to evaluate what the forty-person team had accomplished.

  The
plain fact was that there had never been a series of murders as difficult to solve as the Green River killings. The King County Sheriff’s Department wasn’t equipped to do it in the beginning, nor would any other department in the United States have been. Yes, King County had worked the Ted Bundy murders, but only three of Bundy’s victims were found within its jurisdiction, three were Seattle police cases, one was a Thurston County case, and one girl had disappeared in Corvallis, Oregon. Subsequent Bundy victims were abducted from Utah, Colorado, and Florida. In the end, Bundy was never charged in Washington State, and he was convicted, of course, in Florida and executed there.

  The Green River Killer was mainly striking in Seattle and King County, and seeming to do it with impunity. Those who hunted for him knew he was no superman, but his apparently stranger-to-stranger homicides, with so many names and identities, were the hardest of all to solve.

  They needed time. Time for the computer to be programmed. Time to follow up the ten thousand leads that had by now poured into the task force. In October of 1984, their $200,000 computer went on line, a tremendous help for the task force in keeping track of things, such as how many times a certain name might pop up on an F.I.R. Cross-referencing leads and even nonthreatening johns could very well pop up a name that would be vital.

  A lot of things were happening through the summer and fall of 1984, and the jabs at the task force became sharper as the months passed. It was hard to take. It would always be hard to take.

  Frank Adamson had good reasons for not revealing any number of facts uncovered by the task force, and he and his detectives absorbed complaints from the public that nothing was happening. They all knew that they cared about the victims and their families; taking the abuse thrown at them was just part of the job.

  But something else was not happening, something hopeful. The disappearances had stopped.