When I received a copy of Wells’s letter to me, it was undated, and it looked as if it was a rough draft of a letter he had worked over for some time, scratching out sections and adding inserts to make himself clear. It could have been written months before he shot himself on September 22 or 23, 1989.
“Re Your Green River Killer Project
Dear Ms Rule:
It is my understanding you are writing a book about the Green River Killer w/a scheduled publication date sometime this summer. It is further my understanding, based on accounts in the press, that you do not believe the GRK is in custody. I believe you are mistaken in this regard in that the man I believe to be the GRK is in custody on unrelated charges.
The basis of my suspicions regarding the ID of the GRK is somewhat analogous to your suspicions re: Ted Bundy where there was no direct confession, even to intimate friends, but a myriad of suspicious circumstances which would have considerable significance to a perspicacious observer.
As I have not followed the killings in the press as they have occurred, I would appreciate your sending me an advance copy of what you have written so far so that I can better understand the killer’s M.O. & the background of the victims.
Thank you
Sincerely, D.D.W.”
At that point, some fifteen years ago, I hadn’t written anything beyond notes because no one had been charged with the Green River murders. And I had no plans to publish a book in the summer of 1989 or 1990, if that was what Dale Wells meant.
Most of all, I felt sad that Wells hadn’t contacted me or someone about his anxiety and his depression. Because my only sibling had committed suicide, and after volunteering at the Crisis Clinic, I have always found suicide the saddest way to end a life. Maybe I could have eased Wells’s mind over some perceived guilt feelings about Bill Stevens’s situation. Maybe I could have listened to his suspicions. More likely, there was nothing I could have done. It was obvious he believed Stevens was a serial killer whom he had befriended unaware, just as I had befriended Ted Bundy unaware. He may have felt guilty because he hadn’t come forward sooner. He may even have felt guilty for telling detectives about Stevens’s hatred for prostitutes. None of that should have been enough for him to take his own life.
In the end, all I could do was try to comfort Dale Wells’s girlfriend and his landlady when they called me, but I could do so only in general terms because I never knew the man they mourned.
Green River Task Force commander Bob Evans, whom I have known since he was a road deputy, told reporters it was clear to him that Wells’s letter to me compared Stevens to Bundy, but that his detectives weren’t sure what significance to attach to the letter. “It’s just another bizarre twist,” he said, “in [what is] probably this country’s most bizarre case.”
The Spokane County Sheriff’s investigators and the Green River Task Force carried stacks of papers and files out of Wells’s apartment, but they never found anything that connected either Wells or Stevens to the Green River murders.
William Stevens II was transferred to Spokane County a few days after Dale Wells’s suicide. He had only another month to serve on his King County sentence. However, he and his attorney had steadfastly refused to discuss the Green River murders with the task force, blocking any progress on his case for months.
Robert Stevens, who was a seventeen-year navy veteran, came forward in defense of his brother with photographs of him vacationing on the East Coast with their parents. The dates on the photos and the credit card slips from several cities seemed to validate that Bill Stevens was not in Washington State for most of 1982, and particularly on vital days in July.
After an exhaustive examination of Stevens’s pornography collection, weapons, and police paraphernalia, nothing whatsoever was found linking him to the Green River cases. Reluctantly, the task force accepted that the prime suspect so far wasn’t their man either.
Robert Stevens called a press conference to say he was furious with the task force for searching his parents’ home, and for the ordeal his family had undergone because of the publicity surrounding that.
Evans countered, “It is not my fault he [Bill Stevens] was a fugitive, that he told his friends he wanted to do things to prostitutes and that he collected police badges and equipment. If I would have walked away from that without checking it out, I should have been fired.”
On December 6, 1989, Stevens pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush to one count of being a felon and fugitive in possession of a firearm. In a plea bargain, two similar firearms counts were dismissed, and U.S. Attorney Ron Skibbie recommended a standard range of two to eight months in prison. The judge accepted the plea but said he would determine the sentence. The maximum penalty was ten years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release.
In the end, Steven’s sentence didn’t really matter. He was diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer while still in prison and subsequently paroled. Once overweight, he weighed under ninety pounds when he died in September of 1991 at the age of forty-one. He was unrecognizable as the man whose picture appeared on front pages from British Columbia to California, Washington, and Oregon to Idaho. Even so, he had been arrested for theft in the last year of his troubled life. He was a consummate con man who never used his superior intelligence for anything but the next scam.
Was Bill Stevens responsible for any of the sexual assaults or deaths of young women in Washington and Oregon? I don’t know. Was he the Green River Killer?
No. He liked to frighten women as he had scared his tenant in Oregon. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had planned to scare the woman who left the Beaverton bar with a stranger. The “body” in the “open grave” she saw might well have only been one of Stevens’s mannequins.
46
BY 1990, THE GREEN RIVER Task Force’s days were numbered, its manpower and assets siphoned off into the county’s Major Crimes Unit, and then the detectives were quietly reassigned. Where Frank Adamson’s task force had once had seventy people, including clerical support staff, Bobby Evans had only seventeen, and they were much easier to disassemble without fanfare.
Fifteen million dollars and a tremendous amount of work and dedication hadn’t brought the real killer to his knees. Some of the best detectives in America had stepped up to the plate, full of energy and confidence, and struck out. One of the F.B.I. special agents—Paul Lindsay—had been so sure that he would find the man who had murdered at least four dozen women. In the end, Lindsay said to Frank Adamson, “Captain, I am humbled.”
The others who had hung in for so long probably felt the same way.
Dave Reichert, the youthful detective of 1982, had some lines in his face now and his hair was shot with gray. He was promoted to sergeant and moved out of the task force. When Mertie Winston, Tracy’s mother, met with him and pleaded with him not to give up the search for the man who had killed her daughter and so many others, Reichert tried to explain to her that he wasn’t quitting—he never would—but he was in a command position and he couldn’t command the people he had worked beside.
Some of the task force investigators had retired, some were dead, and many of them had lost heart. In the prior eighteen months, two of their most likely suspects had been cleared. It was difficult to believe they would ever again execute a search warrant that wouldn’t turn out to be a bitter disappointment.
Every so often, another skull turned up in some godforsaken spot, but the public seemed jaded about it now. Even as the possibility that William Stevens might be the GRK still existed in October 1989, the remains of a woman who had been missing since 1983 were found just south of the SeaTac Airport. The skeleton was within fifty yards of the remains of three other victims—Mary Bridget Meehan, Connie Naon, and Kelly Ware. An Alaska Airlines employee found it as he was clearing brush, and Dr. Reay’s office tried to establish who the vacant-eyed skull had once been.
Through the long Green River siege, Bill Haglund had become expert at com
paring the jaws and teeth of the lost girls to the hundreds of dental records he had gathered. Forensic odontology is a technique that has emerged as a significant tool of forensic science. A human’s teeth are unique—not as individual as DNA or the whorls and ridges of fingerprints, but unique nonetheless. Size, shape, placement in the mouth, and chipped, broken, and missing teeth hold a kind of silent history of who that person is, or was. Furthermore, victims of murder and sex crimes often have bite marks that can be used to identify their attackers.
In his job as the chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office since 1983, Haglund had been called upon again and again to find a name and a life to fit the pathetic bones ravaged first by a killer and then by animals and the elements. Despite his somber job, he was a pleasure to know, a gentle man with a great sense of humor.
One evening each Christmas season, I got together with my neighbor Cherisse Luxa, the longtime task force member who oversaw the records for still-missing Green River victims and did her share of digging and sifting in the wilderness. We looked forward to an invitation to dinner at Bill and Claudia Haglund’s north-end home. Bill’s pets and avocation usually stayed in his basement, and in their cages. He raised boa constrictors.
While I am afraid of rats and certain big hairy spiders, I’ve never been afraid of snakes, so one of my oddest holiday rituals was to get my picture taken with Bill Haglund’s twenty-plus-foot boa constrictor. Since few of the Haglunds’ dinner guests, including Cherie, cared to spend up-close time with his pets, Bill was happy to drape one of the snakes around my neck. It was my third or fourth Christmas when I discovered that while boa constrictors aren’t poisonous, they do have teeth. Fortunately, the young snake I was holding bit Bill and not me. He laughed, but I quickly handed his newest pet back to him.
Whenever I look at photographs of a grim-looking Haglund at a body site, I remember how much he cares for the families of victims and what a warm heart he has. Long after the worst of the Green River saga was over, he spent months working for the United Nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, helping to identify unknown victims of terrorism who had been buried in mass graves. Cheri Luxa also went to Bosnia and even rescued some Croatian kittens and brought them home with her.
HAGLUND had gathered more than two hundred sets of dental charts, mostly from Seattle area women, but some included missing persons from Florida, Oklahoma, and Montana. He had identified Debra Estes because he’d memorized her unique dental characteristic—a stainless-steel crown. Now he reconstructed the jaw of the latest possible victim. A missing nineteen-year-old named Andrea Childers was initially added to the Green River list in April 1983, but she’d been taken off when records at the Canadian border noted that someone with the same name had crossed into British Columbia a year later.
Like Missy Draper’s, dark-eyed Andrea’s dental records showed a distinct gap between her upper middle teeth. Haglund looked at the teeth in the skull and realized that Andrea hadn’t gone to Canada; she had been hidden just off the Strip for six years. She was victim number forty-one.
Even though bloodhounds and searchers had combed the area where Andrea’s remains were found years later, they had missed her. “When someone’s buried,” Captain Bobby Evans said, “unless you know a grave is there, you can walk right over the site and never even know it.” Evans believed that there were many more victims yet to be found than anyone realized. “There are at least eight, and I’m convinced there are more.”
Andrea had grown up in southern California, but she moved to Seattle when she was sixteen to live with her father and stepmother. She’d been very close to her eighty-five-year-old grandmother who cried as she remembered the last time she saw Andrea. “She wanted to be a dancer. She gave lessons and she was very good, and she taught dance exercise,” Helen Koehler remembered. “She came for a late birthday celebration [in 1983]—her birthday was March 29. She was wearing a beautiful dress and a long gray coat. I baked her a chocolate cake. She kissed me, like always, and then she left.”
OTHER MEDICAL EXAMINERS’ personnel might have thrown out old dental records that seemed no longer to have any relevance, but not Bill Haglund and Dr. Don Reay. “This whole case is so freaky,” Haglund said, “that I am almost paranoid about getting rid of anything.”
None of the Green River Task Force regimes—from Dick Kraske’s to Frank Adamson’s through Jim Pompey’s and Greg Boyle’s to Bob Evans’s—had gotten rid of anything either. The first computers had been about as modern as a treadle-powered sewing machine, but the newest computer system was a marvel, and it contained photos and text and even images of scribbled notes on matchbooks and torn pieces of paper. Nine thousand pieces of evidence remained in the Green River archives.
Try to imagine your own life, as if you had pressed every corsage, saved every letter, taken photos of each piece of jewelry you ever owned, every garment, dirt samples from the yard of every residence, all your lost baby teeth, locks of your hair, all the artifacts of your days on earth. That may give you some idea of the depth and breadth of the Green River files. Each victim’s section was at least two thousand pages long; some were ten times that count. And as anyone familiar with police files knows, so many promising interviews end in disappointment, but the text of each was preserved.
Tom Jensen had joined the Green River Task Force in 1984, and there had once been fifty detectives working on it with him. Now for a long while Jensen was the only “keeper of the flame.” Jensen is a friendly, Scandinavian-looking man with dark blond red hair and mustache. There must have been many times when he wished for another assignment, because it was such a tortuous case. But he stayed because he worried about what would happen to the cases if he left. Later Jim Doyon joined him, but the rows and rows of files had to be intimidating. How could two detectives ever hope to follow up on all those tips?
Just because the task force had disbanded didn’t mean that new reports weren’t coming in. Wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends continued to call me throughout the 1990s, each of them convinced that the men they had once loved were, in truth, serial killers—and probably the Green River Killer. I passed the most credible information on to Tom Jensen, knowing that probably all he could do was feed the facts into the computer on the chance there might be a hit with information someone else had reported.
Despite the intrusiveness of local reporters who had no compunction about publishing information the task force wanted kept secret, the Green River investigators did manage to play some of their cards close to their vests. “We were excited by these microscopic pinkish glass beads the crime lab detected on some of the victims,” Frank Adamson recalled. “They looked as if they were very rare. We were feeling pretty good at first, but the F.B.I. lab told us what they were, and that they were really quite common. Almost anyone who drives on highways has some of those on their cars. The beads were from reflector stuff on road signs, or in paint used to paint the center lines.”
In February 1988, the F.B.I. had listed the commonalities among the Green River victims in the case they called “Greenmurs: MAJOR CASE #771.” Maybe all the dead girls weren’t known in very many places in America, but the Bureau recognized their deaths as some of the most important the Behavioral Science Unit had ever helped investigate.
The B.S.U. noted that all the victims were found outdoors, and that there was precious little physical evidence left behind. A few of the dead girls had their clothing scattered near their bodies; most were nude. The public did not know that Opal Mills was the only victim whose body held evidence of a blood group other than her own. Semen in her vagina was from a man with Type O blood; Opal had Type A blood.
Moira Bell, who survived her attack at Horsetail Falls in Oregon, had described the two-inch-wide, beige masking tape that was used to bind her wrists and arms. She also remembered that the knife used to stab her was a French butcher-block type of kitchen knife with a straight wooden handle and a straight edge, approximately eight inches long in a triangu
lar shape, wider at the handle.
Many of the victims had had tiny fibers on their bodies. With a tool called a spinarette, crime lab technicians (like the Western Washington State Police lab’s resident fiber expert Chesterine Cwiklik) can find all manner of matches with minuscule fibers. Indeed, some of the strongest evidence against Ted Bundy were five distinctive fibers that could be linked to him found in the van he used in 1979 to kidnap twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach, the murder that he paid for in Florida’s electric chair. Rug fibers had also helped convict Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer.
In the Green River evidence room, there were: blue acrylic fibers, green acrylic fibers, red acrylic fibers, black polyester fibers, and green carpetlike fibers, all found with the victims’ remains. Missy Plager and Alma Smith both had “blue” dog hairs on their remains.
Interestingly, there were also paint particles found on eight of the victims: red enamel, medium brown enamel, medium blue metallic “nitrocellulose lacquer with fragmentary light gray primer,” and medium blue metallic paint. “None of the above-described paint particles is typical of—or consistent with—any type of original motor vehicle finish system,” Skip Palenik had reported. “A particular source or origin of these particles cannot be determined.” And eighteen of the victims had foreign hairs on them, hair that had not come from their own heads or bodies.
There had been at least eight vehicle sightings—five different pickup trucks, a green station wagon, and two blue station wagons: among them a full-size American-made light-colored truck, 1960–64; a 1970–77 (possible Ford) perhaps white over blue; an older 1960s GMC or Chevrolet pickup, turquoise green; a burgundy pickup; a two-toned brown pickup—and on and on. Some witnesses had reported numerous “sanded” spots painted with primer, as if the pickups were in the process of being repainted. There was a definite preference for pickup trucks, and all the vehicles were American made. None of them had been brand-new, and many had campers or canopies on the back.