Green River, Running Red

  “He was certainly one of the primary people we had,” Frank Adamson said. “We followed him, and surveilled him, watching him stop and talk to prostitutes. We watched him staring at them. We talked to them, and we found no one he was hurting at that time. But he was certainly interested. Later, we were able to connect him to a number of prostitutes by talking to their girlfriends. We knew he had quite an involvement with prostitutes, but we didn’t think he was killing them.”

  In the 1985 incident, Judith’s new boyfriend had even agreed to take a lie detector test and Norm Matzke gave him a polygraph. Matzke, who had long been the sheriff’s department’s polygrapher, following in the footsteps of his father, didn’t think this man was responsible for the Green River deaths. His pulse stayed even, he didn’t sweat a drop, and his blood pressure didn’t waver.

  He himself was pretty sure he could always fool their fancy polygraph, but he decided that the next time they talked to him, he would refuse to take a lie detector test. There was no sense being foolhardy.

  SOMETIME in either May or June of 1985, Judith agreed to move in with him. He was still living in the small house that backed up to the bank above the I-5 Freeway. Built on a good-size lot with room for their camping rig, it was a nice little house. Judith was thrilled to be living in her own home again. She was with a man who had perfect attendance at his job and who always came straight home to her. If he had to work overtime, he called her, and she appreciated that. He would go almost three decades without being late for work more than a handful of times, and that was only a matter of two or three minutes.

  He was so considerate that he didn’t even ask Judith to get up and cook breakfast for him when he worked the early shift. He told her he’d stop at Denny’s or some other twenty-four-hour restaurant on his way to work. He handed his paychecks over to her and she would take care of the bills, but she always made sure he had enough money with him when he left for work to buy breakfast and lunch and fill up his gas tank.

  When Judith’s younger daughter and her boyfriend and their babies needed someplace to live until they got back on their feet, he agreed that they could stay with him and Judith. She realized that not many men would have done that. He was someone she could count on even though he didn’t seem anxious to get married again. She figured that would happen some day.

  In the meantime, theirs was a very comfortable relationship. They went camping, watched television together, and indulged a mutual passion: collecting, restoring, and selling things that other people had either thrown away or sold cheap. “We’re pack rats,” Judith said. “We like to save stuff. We don’t like to see stuff go in the landfill. We’d always go to the swap meet. We’d have yard sales. Oh, it was great because my ex-husband never let me have yard sales. We have so much fun doing that together.”

  Both of them were amazed at some of the things other people threw away at the landfill, and by the “free piles” left behind at the Midway Swap Meet at the end of a weekend. “Chad and him would look at the free piles,” Judith said fondly, “and maybe find something that needs to be fixed. We’d take things home and fix ’em, and so…like a bicycle. We got all kinds of bikes. He’d fix a bike after getting it for free, and sell it to a little kid who’d be happy for getting a bike for five or ten dollars. And a toy. He’d pick up a toy and maybe the grandkids would like to play with it.”

  They found that they could make more profit by having frequent garage and yard sales at their house than they could by renting a space at the swap meet. Their neighbors grew used to seeing the “Yard Sale” sign out when the weather was good.

  Pat Lindsay, who worked for the U.S. Postal Service, had sold him his house in 1981 and still lived close by. Although something about him always gave Pat a weird feeling, she liked Judith and often chatted with her as she presided over a yard sale. “They always had sales going, and baby kittens. Judith loved her cats and kittens,” Pat recalled. “I think the funny thing about him was that he didn’t seem to remember me at all. I’d sold him his house, but he didn’t recognize my face or connect me to that when I stopped by during a yard sale. I could have been a complete stranger as far as he was concerned.”

  Once, before Judith moved in, Pat recalled that he had approached a couple of men in the neighborhood and asked them for help ripping out a carpet in one of his bedrooms. “He said he’d kicked over a can of red paint or spilled it somehow, and he needed to get it out of there and replace it. They helped him get it into his truck, but he never explained how he could have spilled so much paint.”

  Once he had the carpet in his pickup, he wouldn’t have trouble getting it out at the county’s Midway landfill off Orilla Road. The men noted that he had a kind of hoist with cables and a “come-along hitch” bolted to his truck.

  Despite all the things they found “Dumpster diving” or scanning other people’s sales for free “stuff,” he never bought Judith any presents. She didn’t mind. She had her rings from her first marriage melted down and redesigned. As far as any jewelry purchases, that wasn’t something he would buy to surprise her.

  “We did all of that together,” she said, explaining that he never brought gifts home for her. He just wasn’t like that. “We went shopping together.”

  There were so many things she did with him for the first time in her life. She went on her first plane trip when he took her to Reno. She loved the camping, either at Leisure Time Resorts campgrounds, where they split a membership with his parents, or roughing it. “At the very beginning of our relationship,” she recalled, “we went camping up on the Okanogan ’cause he had a week off. That was just so [much] fun and delightful. He was so nice and gentle—I hadn’t known him for very long.”

  They came back from the largest county in Washington and the Pasayten Wilderness that led into Canada via the North Cascades Highway, and she was thrilled by the grandeur of the view and the Ross Dam, with its clear blue water. “I never got to go camping before,” Judith explained.

  They visited several Leisure Time locations, mostly the site up past Ken’s Truck Stop off I-90, but also those at Ocean Shores on Washington’s Pacific Coast; Crescent Bar in Concrete, Washington; and Grandy Creek. At Leisure Time, they could pull their camper in and have electricity and water hookups, and cooking grills.

  They finally got married in their neighbors’ front yard on June 12, 1988. Judith was the one who gave him an ultimatum about making a permanent commitment. “I told him after three years, he’s not getting rid of me. ‘We’re getting married!’ He said okay.”

  The Bob Havens hosted the event, and most of the people who lived along their street attended. Everyone liked Judith. She was a sweet woman, and he was a good enough neighbor.

  They soon bought a bigger house down in Des Moines, and Judith went to work to help pay the mortgage. She sewed on a commercial machine for a SCUBA equipment company there, and later worked at the Kindercare day care, both Des Moines businesses. He kept his job as a painter. He took great pride in his work, but he was always careful about cleaning up before he came home. He didn’t have a spot of paint on him when he left the plant and he even combed his mustache to be sure all the paint flecks were gone.

  They were definitely moving up in the world. Judith was happy in her marriage, and she enjoyed being with her husband’s parents and brothers. She worried a lot about her daughters, especially her oldest, who had gone off to the East Coast, but she knew she could count on her husband.

  37

  THE FIRST HALF OF 1985 continued to be a fallow period in Seattle as far as new disappearances in the Green River case were concerned and that was one positive sign. The headlines slowed to a crawl, and they were mostly rehashes of earlier stories now. Almost everyone believed that the dread killer had moved on, and some people hoped he was dead. The task force investigators didn’t, however. If he was dead, so many questions would go unanswered forever. There was a good chance, however, that he had changed his base of operations—to at least one neighboring sta
te, Oregon.

  It looked as if the Green River Killer had thrown the task force a curve. At twelve seventeen PM, on June 13, 1985, a worker was operating a bulldozer on Bull Mountain Road near the Tigard/Tualatin area in Oregon, clearing the land so that a tree farm could be planted there. Tigard is about eight miles south of Portland, a quick exit off the I-5 Freeway. As the dozer operator looked idly at the dirt he had just turned over, he drew in his breath sharply, seeing what could only be human bones. He had uncovered skeletal remains.

  Washington County sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene and found a skull, what appeared to be two pelvises, and some rib bones. The skull had an obvious defect, a hole left either by a bullet or a surgical procedure. The Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office said that the hole was from surgery performed many years earlier.

  The remains of one of the bodies belonged to a black female who would have been five feet one to five feet four inches tall and had been in her early twenties. Forensic anthropologists estimated that the bones had been buried there for at least a year. A day later, she was identified as Denise Darcel Bush by the Portland-based M.E., in cooperation with the Oregon Health Services Dental School, Division of Forensic Science, and Dr. Don Reay’s M.E.’s office in Seattle. Only her upper jaw was available, however. Although her upper teeth were enough to make the identification, it seemed odd that none of the searchers could locate her lower mandible.

  There was only the calvarium (the upper rounded part) of her skull. But this was the skull of the only victim who had once had brain surgery. Denise Darcel had been missing since October 1982, almost three years earlier. Where had she been for two years?

  (Bizarrely, her lower mandible had been left near Seattle, although that would not be discovered for five more years. In 1990, her lower jaw and the shunt that had carried excess fluid from her brain were found near Tukwila, not far from the Strip. Why had her killer separated her skull into two parts and placed them two hundred miles apart? To confuse the detectives who hunted him?)

  The killer was playing macabre games with the task force. There could be no doubt of that. More bones were located a week later. Four detectives from the Green River Task Force drove to the Tigard field as the search for remains continued: Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Frank Atchley, and Ed Streidinger.

  Adamson agreed to meet a Washington County, Oregon, deputy at the site of the body discoveries. “He hadn’t been out to the site, and he wasn’t sure where the location was, but he had the number of the closest telephone pole,” Adamson recalled. “But I knew. The area was new to me, but so similar to the sites in Washington. I saw the turnout spot on the road. It looked familiar. It was the Green River Killer’s favorite kind of spot. And then I saw the number on the pole. I knew this had to be where the remains had been found. I pulled over and waited for the local deputy.”

  It would take a week for absolute identification to be made of the second body, which had apparently lain undiscovered for two or three years. They had found a complete skull, one rib, a part of a pelvis, an arm, a tooth, and a partial section of vertebrae. When the name was announced, it was shocking. This was Shirley Marie Sherrill, who had not disappeared from Portland at all, but from Seattle. Her killer had driven her—alive or, most probably, dead—all this way to bury her.

  Even more puzzling was the discovery two days later of more remains. As the soil in the Tigard/Tualatin fields was turned over, then raked, sifted, and searched, they found two more skeletons. They had located yet another “dump site.” These last two girls could not be identified.

  When night fell, a neon sign nearby blinked on and off: Jiggles. It was a club for men, a club not unlike Sugar’s in Seattle. Its significance wasn’t obvious in June of 1985.

  The official toll of Green River victims was twenty-six. Eighteen of them were identified; the rest only “Bones.” On June 28, 1985, the F.B.I. officially came aboard the investigation. Victims had been taken across the state line between Washington and Oregon. No one knew if they were dead or alive when that happened.

  The summer of 1985 was quiet, as if everyone in Seattle and Portland who cared about the Green River Killer’s victims—and, admittedly, some did not—was holding his or her breath, waiting.

  And then something happened near Portland that made investigators wonder, even more than the Tigard/Tualatin body discoveries, if the man they tracked had moved his center of operations to Oregon. It would make sense. Things had probably gotten too hot for him in Seattle. A couple of the johns they had stopped on the Strip were repeat offenders, even though the task force hadn’t been able to gather enough evidence against them to make an arrest that would stick. Maybe he was really gone.

  On September 4, 1985, two young women boarded a Greyhound bus for Portland. The two, Moira Bell* and Kitty Cain,* had met at a drug rehab program in Seattle, and when they got out, they decided to head south. They were very young, fifteen and sixteen, but far too familiar with the seamy side of life even though their pretty faces were dewy and almost childlike.

  They had barely arrived in Portland before local officers picked them up and radioed in a Wants and Warrants request. Kitty Cain was kept in jail, but Moira Bell’s name brought forth no outstanding warrants and she was driven back to the bus station. She was tired and broke and she made several collect phone calls to Seattle to men she knew there. With no help forthcoming, she struck up a conversation with a man she knew only as “B.B.” They both indulged in cocaine, enough for Moira to go out on the street for three hours to make motel money. With enough to pay for a room, Moira slept all night and most of the next day.

  On September 5, she was working Union Street at about ten PM with another girl she knew. It wasn’t a good night. About midnight, one john pulled a knife on her, but she managed to get away. At three in the morning, she got into an argument with B.B. She didn’t have enough for a room, so she was still out on Union an hour later.

  A blue taxi, a station wagon with a company logo on the door and a light on top, pulled up to the curb near Moira, and the driver said, “Do you want a date?”

  She asked what he wanted and they agreed on oral sex for $20. She studied the cab’s interior as they drove: a navy blue dash, navy vinyl bench seats with headrests, automatic transmission, an old-fashioned meter with a white flag, and a package of Benson & Hedges on the dash. She wasn’t afraid. It was just her habit to memorize her surroundings. What she was doing to survive was dumb and dangerous, but Moira herself was very smart.

  The cab headed south, and then the driver parked under a bridge. He handed Moira a twenty-dollar bill and she slipped it into her right boot. She didn’t use birth control pills, but she always carried condoms with her. As she bent over to put one on her client’s erect penis, he suddenly grabbed her hair in his right hand and produced a knife with his left.

  “Do as I say or I’ll kill you.” He breathed.

  She took him seriously, letting him tape her wrists together behind her back with masking tape. Then he taped her arms to her body at her elbows. She was helpless. The driver forced her to the floorboard where she had to kneel. He headed toward the freeway going north, and then west.

  “Excuse me,” she asked, “but what are you going to do with me?”

  “Whatever I want. Do as I say and I won’t kill you.”

  As they drove through the darkness just before dawn, the cabdriver alternately threatened her with the knife and checked her bonds to be sure they hadn’t loosened. Finally, she heard the sound of gravel as the station wagon pulled off the road and parked. The driver leaned over and felt in her boots—he wanted his money back.

  “It’s in my right boot,” she whispered.

  “Shut up! I didn’t tell you to talk.”

  Next, he walked around to the passenger door and pulled her roughly out into the chilly air. He grabbed the front of her sweater dress, pulling it down to her waist. His efforts to get her dress off detached the tape where her elbows had been pinned to her
body. But her wrists were still tightly bound together and she couldn’t fight him as he tore her panties, panty hose, and bra away, leaving her naked, except for the sweater dress at her waist.

  And then he forced her onto the hood of his vehicle and raped her violently. As he pulled her off the hood, he punched her twice in the face, making her dizzy and she started to fall. That angered him and he socked her twice more, this time in her spine.

  She was bleeding now, and the rapist was furious that he’d gotten her blood on his hand. He climbed into his cab, grabbed a rag, and wiped it off. She lay very still on the ground, hoping he would just drive away and leave her there, wherever she was. But he sat quietly in the driver’s seat for what seemed to her “a very long time.” She hoped against hope that he wouldn’t come back.

  But he did. When he headed toward her, she could see that he’d changed his clothes; he now wore a blue nylon jumpsuit with an angled pocket that was zipped closed. Methodically, he tore the tape off her wrists, and finished ripping her dress off. He grunted as he used her panty hose to strangle her, but they tore in two. He reached into his back pocket for a blue bandanna. Once again, he placed a ligature around her neck and tightened it, but even though the bandanna was stronger, it broke, too.

  “I pretended I was dead,” Moira later told a female F.B.I. agent. “He went back and sat in the driver’s seat again. After a while, he came back and checked my pulse and my neck. He said, ‘Sorry, but I’m going to have to kill you. You might tell.’ ”

  She lay as still as death, offering no resistance at all as he grabbed her ankles and dragged her backward over rocks and sharp weeds for about seventy-five feet to the edge of a steep embankment. “It was about thirty-five feet down, but he pushed me over. I stayed limp and kept playing dead. I rolled only about halfway down because something, maybe a tree or something, caught me.”