Green River, Running Red

  The rapist waited at the top of the bank, smoking a cigarette and watching her. Then he clambered down to where she lay still, “dead.” Once more, he checked her pulse under her arm and in her neck. He must have felt her heart because he pushed her again until she landed at the bottom of the embankment in a fetal position, still not moving. She saw that he was smoking another cigarette, deciding. And he came back again.

  “He stabbed me in the chest—straight in. I took both my hands and pulled the knife out, but then I went completely limp. This time when he checked for a pulse, I held my breath and I guess he didn’t feel anything.”

  He climbed the hill to smoke. And then, for the last time, he crawled down to where she lay, sending rocks and dirt ahead of him. She was getting good at not breathing, and she wondered if she was dying. He evidently felt no sign of life, and he pulled a big oil drum in front of her body as if he was trying to hide her from the road above. Then he changed his mind and moved it away, but he pulled up handfuls of tall grass and threw them on top of her.

  She never heard his car engine start or the crunch of gravel. She figured he was up there, waiting to kill her. As the sky turned to pink and then blue, she heard three train whistles, the last one heading west. She realized now that she was in the Columbia Gorge, somewhere near Horsetail Falls.

  When it was full daylight, Moira painfully inched her way up to the road. There was a car in the turnout, but she thanked God that it wasn’t the blue taxi. She staggered toward it and gasped, “I’ve been stabbed and raped and the taxi driver did it!”

  After several days recovering in a Portland hospital, Moira Bell worked with police artists and the F.B.I. to create a sketch of the man who had been so determined to kill her. The sketch that resulted looked very much like one of the Green River composite drawings done in King County.

  The problem was that the four most widely circulated drawings were nothing like one another. One showed a phantomlike face with a long chin and “hippie-length” hair, another had a broad face with very curly short hair, one had short hair combed forward around his face and acne, and the last had a disproportionately long neck and hooded eyes that squinted.

  Moira estimated that her rapist was probably between twenty-five and thirty, five feet nine to six feet tall, thinly built, with sandy shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy or acne-scarred complexion. He had had a thin mustache.

  Were any of the drawings really like the GRK?

  Maybe he was a master of disguise, or at least using wigs to change the way he looked.

  Moira’s ordeal struck a chord in my memory. One of the many women who had called me, her voice trembling even though it had been decades since her own encounter with a man she would never forget, had told me a very similar story, only it had happened ten years before Moira hid at the bottom of a ravine, six years before the Green River cases surfaced in Seattle.

  “I was only nineteen,” Cheryl told me, “and it was 1975. I felt I had no other way to make a living after my divorce. I was working in downtown Seattle for a place called Artists and Models. I was ‘outlawing’—that means working without a pimp. I didn’t know the city very well then, but I was living near 23rd and Cherry Street. I was probably working on Pike Street.

  “This man, who seemed about my age, called me over to his car and he asked, ‘Can I pay you for sex?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

  “Before I got into his car, I checked the door handle to be sure it flipped up from the inside—I always did that. It seemed okay, so I got in. We drove for about twenty minutes, and he was strange. He didn’t say a word to me, and he didn’t even turn on the radio. My radar was working at about 150 percent, but there was nothing to pick up on. I thought to myself how ‘spiritless’ he was, and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.

  “We were on a two-lane road, not on the freeway, and we were in the country before I knew it. I don’t know if we were north or south of Seattle. I’m still not sure. He turned off onto a sort of path, not really a road, but it looked as though a few cars had driven down there. The minute he stopped, I was out of the car and running, and I leapt over this embankment. It was steep, but I slowed myself a little by grabbing onto grass and weeds. There was nothing below my feet, so I know I didn’t fall all the way to the bottom—I was probably only about ten feet down.

  “I could see him up there, trying to spot me. He was backlit by the moon. His foot was on the car fender, and he was smoking a cigarette—not nervously, just standing there, smoking, trying to spot me.”

  She was still terribly afraid of him, but she was also frightened of slipping farther down the bank and dropping she didn’t know how far. She could see part of his car and him.

  “After a long time, he said, ‘Come on up here. I won’t hurt you.’

  “I was so scared, but I climbed back up and I got in his car. He didn’t ask for sex again. He didn’t talk at all on the way back either, but he drove me to a corner close to where my apartment was, and he let me go.”

  Twenty-five years later, she would see the photograph of a much older man, and recognize him immediately. He had the same build, medium to thin, just an average-size man, and the eyes were the same, the lids so heavy that his eyelashes didn’t show. When a photograph showed him in profile, her heart really convulsed. This was the view she’d had of him as they drove silently through the night.

  One question keeps running through Cheryl’s mind: “Why didn’t he kill me?”

  She had survived, and she began to straighten out her life the way many people who believe absolutely that they have had a near-death experience often do. She returned to Portland, where she had lived most of her life, finished college, and found a profession in which she worked for twenty years. Even so, the memory of the man outlined against the moon never really went away.

  Cheryl’s recollections of her terror would be reflected many times over the years ahead as women called or wrote me. I became absolutely convinced that there were probably twenty to forty women who had come close to death at the hands of the Green River Killer, but their will to survive or perhaps pure luck had saved them.

  One more girl who didn’t get away was found four days after Moira Bell escaped her rapist. A teacher accompanying a class on a visit to Seattle’s Seward Park on September 8 found something that had to be shielded from the students’ gaze. This is a huge wooded park that extends like a thumb into Lake Washington a few miles east of the Rainier District. A human skull, long denuded of flesh, was hidden there. It was a much more urban site than most of the places where remains had been found. The search crews, long since expert at outdoor scenes moved over the park, and they discovered an entire skeleton in the shadows at the base of a fir tree. There were no clothes at all in the vicinity.

  It was Mary Exzetta West, who had been pregnant at seventeen and scared about what she was going to do. She hadn’t come home to her aunt’s house on February 6, 1984, and had probably been in this lovely park for all of the eighteen months she had been missing.

  38

  THE GREEN RIVER TASK FORCE continued to be alternately hammered and ignored by the media. It received a million-dollar federal grant in November 1985, and everyone had expected an arrest would surely follow soon after. When it didn’t, taxpayers and politicians began to grumble. The King County executive who had backed the task force, Randy Revelle, was out of office and it didn’t look as though the new man, Tim Hill, would be nearly as supportive of a very expensive investigation that had yet to net any rewards.

  The F.B.I. wrote a summary of the cases to isolate patterns that might have escaped detection. Amina Agisheff was still deemed to be the first victim, taken on July 7, 1982; Cindy Ann Smith, the final young woman abducted, was seen for the last time on March 21, 1984. There were twenty-six Caucasian victims known dead, ten African American, and one American Indian. Of those still missing, five were Caucasian, three African American, one Hispanic, and one Asian.

  “All victims are believed to have suff
ered from either manual or ligature strangulation, the ligature being that of the killer or the clothing of the victim,” the F.B.I. summary read. “One possible victim who survived her attack, Moira Bell, from Oregon, was stabbed with a knife in combination with being strangled.”

  The cluster the Green River Task Force was focusing on during the holiday season of 1985 was not new; the Mountain View Cemetery site appeared to have held almost as many victims as the Star Lake cluster. Another partial skull had been found on December 15, unidentified bones on December 30, and more on January 3 and January 4, 1986. Not only was the GRK still free, it appeared that there would be no end to the rising death toll. Dr. Don Reay and Bill Haglund believed two of the sets of remains belonged to a twenty- to thirty-year-old black female, who had been five feet one to five feet four, and a fourteen- to seventeen-year-old white female who’d been five feet four to five feet eight.

  Only a fluke had led searchers back to the Auburn graveyard. A cemetery worker had discovered a battered Lincoln Continental in a woods below the actual grave sites. It proved to be a stolen car and it had been pushed into a ravine where it was almost invisible beneath a blanket of fallen leaves. In investigating the auto theft, the bones were found, too.

  It would be poetic justice if the owner of the Lincoln turned out to be the killer. But he wasn’t. The luxury car had been stolen from the street in front of a Tacoma tavern owned by the car’s registered owner, and the Green River investigators found no evidence at all to connect him to the dead girls in the cemetery. The car thief himself was never found.

  Some of the smartest detectives in the Northwest had worked on this thankless case for three and a half years. Almost $8 million had been spent, and still there was nothing to show for it. Now, the task force swelled even further. Ten additional F.B.I. agents were assigned to the Green River cases. This could mean that something big was about to happen, or it could mean that the task force was about to make one last massive effort to bring their quarry in.

  Frank Adamson, who wasn’t given to making statements that might come back to bite him, seemed almost optimistic that 1986 was going to be the year when the Green River Killer would be brought to ground.

  I myself believed that the “fox”—actually “the wolf”—would be penned up and punished. Because of the increased manpower on the task force, I was a lot more likely to wax positive, and I can remember telling a large audience at a seminar in the early months of 1986, “I’m sure he’ll be caught before Thanksgiving—maybe even by Easter.” And just as I had to do several times before, I would have to eat my words.

  I wasn’t that sure, and I had no inside information, but the law of averages convinced me that no one could escape the eye of this hurricane of top cops. Moreover, forensic science seemed to have “gone about as far as it could go”—in my mind, at least. The $200,000 computer was humming along, and criminalists were routinely matching hair and fiber profiles and solving other cases. Forensic anthropologists could establish race and sex from bare skulls, and odontologists could match bite marks to attackers and teeth to dental charts. Blood enzymes could already be isolated to show racial probability.

  Even though it had been less than a year since DNA blood comparisons had solved the first homicide case in the world, DNA testing for all police jurisdictions was on the horizon. The Green River Task Force had a contingency fund of around $5,000 for DNA testing if it seemed feasible.

  Ed Hanson, a task force member on loan from the Washington State Patrol, had an idea that made the job of triangulating measurements at a body site much easier. Given the steep hills and deep ravines and the hundreds of yards the detectives had to traverse over and over in order to mark a body location, Hanson thought it would be far more cost-effective and productive to employ professional surveyors to do that part of the job. And, of course, he was right.

  It had to be only a matter of months now.

  Having fully recovered from the meningitis that had almost killed him a few years earlier, John Douglas updated his profile of the Green River Killer and was one of the F.B.I. agents on hand in Seattle in January and February 1986. At this point, Douglas claimed a 77 percent success rate in the 192 criminal cases he had personally evaluated “after all leads had been exhausted.”

  His second look at the Green River Killer was very close to the first profile he had drawn up. Douglas was quite sure that the GRK was in good physical shape, an outdoorsman, although probably both a drinker and a smoker. “He is not very neat,” Douglas said. He would be a nocturnal cruiser who drove conservative vehicles. Souvenirs and trophies would be important to him, along with newspaper clippings about his crimes. With those things, he could relive the emotional thrills of his murders.

  How old was he? Douglas said “mid-20s to early 30s. There is no burnout for this type of murderer though.” He added, “These homicides reflect rage and anger…. He will not stop killing until he is caught.”

  Every detective on the task force still had a favorite suspect—or two or three. Frank Adamson continued to watch three men who seemed to him to be the most likely candidates for being the Green River Killer. Whenever Adamson had “command duty,” he made it a point to drive by the houses where these men lived. All three lived close by the Green River or the Pac HiWay Strip. One was the wealthy and eccentric farmer who had held the young prostitute captive and collected photos of young women, albeit pictures the task force had never been able to find in his huge barn. Another was a man who was a familiar visitor to the Strip and had been stopped and questioned at least three times, and who had grown up near the highway. The third was a fur trapper, an outdoorsman, who also lived close to the highway.

  Adamson never saw anything suspicious when he drove slowly by their homes, but he thought about them a lot. He wanted to be sure they were still around. “The Green River Killer was extremely active during 1982 and 1983,” he commented. “Out of control, really, with two or three victims a month. And then he appeared to stop—at least around here. I wondered why.”

  In early 1986, Adamson had reread Douglas’s profile as well as profiles done by John Kelly, a New Jersey counselor who was also known to be on-target with his evaluations of suspects. Adamson needed to know which of his three main suspects fit most neatly within the parameters of the profiles.

  John Kelly quickly dismissed Ingmar Rasmussen, the older man with a barn allegedly full of women’s photos. “I believe him to have been a lonely, elderly man who wanted a woman to live with him and take care of him,” he wrote. “He [once] even advertised for such a woman. His house was important to him; he felt secure behind the heavy wooden door. I believe his house was much more important to him than the river or woods…. He was too conservative and concerned about his wealth and success and would not endanger that by being in the river or woods with corpses or transporting them long distances. If [he] was the [Green] River Killer, that girl would never have escaped from his house.”

  The second suspect profile was of the meek man the Pro-Active Team detectives had encountered several times on the highway as he talked to prostitutes. He had admitted, of course, that he tried to choke the girl who “bit him.” But Kelly didn’t think he was viable as a suspect either, despite Sergeant Frank Atchley’s strong belief that he was, along with Adamson’s more tentative suspicions.

  “He had a full-time position…with which he was satisfied,” Kelly wrote. “I believe that the [Green] River Killer could only have a job that consistently took him to or past [the] dump sites. The amount of energy and time involved in stalking and singling out, picking up and controlling, killing, transporting and staging these hookers could not have been done by someone who had to keep a scheduled full-time position.

  “It also seems that he had an overbearing, perfectionistic mother. However, it seems that she showed him enough attention to prove that she cared about him and did not abandon him.”

  And this man had passed a lie detector test.

  John Kelly’s favorite
pick of the trio of “A’s” was the fur trapper. He based this on the man’s early years when his mother allegedly cared more about alcohol than she did about him, alternately abandoning him to be raised by others and behaving in an inappropriate way by letting him sleep in her bed and be aware of her sexual relationships with a series of men.

  The trapper, who was also a fisherman and hunter, was completely at home in the woods and water, and Kelly drew a comparison with the way he stuffed and mounted his animal prey and the way the body sites were staged. While Kelly had devoted a paragraph or two to the old man and the man with the steady job, he wrote quite convincingly for three single-spaced pages about the reasons he had selected the trapper as the prime candidate to be the Green River Killer.

  Adamson had been led to the fur trapper by a ranking officer in the Bellingham, Washington, Police Department who thought he should be considered a likely suspect. His name was Barney Tikkenborg,* a middle-aged man and an avid trapper who was very familiar with the areas where the Green River victims had been found. Other trappers had commented that Tikkenborg was obsessed with killing dogs and took pleasure in using different methods to kill them: traps, rifles, garrotes, knives, and ice picks.

  Task force records in the computer were checked, and Adamson had been surprised to find that two other people had called in their concerns about Tikkenborg. One informant had worked with him as a cement finisher, his other occupation. During the eight years the informant worked with him, Tikkenborg spent most of his time off in the woods, trapping animals for their fur. “He’s extremely strong and athletic—he can run as fast backward as he can forward—but it’s just that he loves to kill things,” the informant said. “Once he bought this doctor’s surgical kit with different scalpels. He told me he was going to try to cut the unborn babies out of the pregnant animals he’d caught.”

  Tikkenborg had also shown off his macabre library, which had books and magazines about human anatomy and various methods of killing people. Moreover, other workers kidded him about the prostitutes he picked up, and he seemed to view all women as merely objects. Ten years earlier, he had been furious because a local college student had allegedly given him a venereal disease.