Green River, Running Red

  There were, of course, several articles that popped up. He had never known exactly when Bridget vanished or when she had died—if, indeed, she had. He looked absently at the date and realized that this early morning was exactly twenty years since Bridget walked down the highway into some dark oblivion.

  “I actually got scared. I knew I wanted to talk to somebody about Bridget. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

  7

  THE KING COUNTY public’s reaction to a yet unknown number of murdered “prostitutes” reflected views that ranged from disapproval and distaste to sympathy and sorrow. Rigidly judgmental editorials popped up in a number of small-town papers in the south end of the county. Essentially, the writers blamed the victims for being out on the street and taking such foolish chances. Beyond that, they accused lawmakers of being lax in controlling sex for sale. Interestingly, nobody blamed the johns who patronized the young women in short skirts, high heels, and, now that the weather was cooling, little rabbit-fur jackets. It seemed somehow more politically correct to condemn the dead girls themselves.

  I LIVED in Des Moines, a little town where the victims were both disappearing and being found, and I passed too many young women who stood on the fog lines along the Pacific Highway. “Fog line” is a literal term; by late September in the Northwest, there is a great need for reflective strips along the side of the road because the wet black asphalt disappears into the thick mist that falls after sunset.

  Sometimes over the years ahead, I would pull over and attempt to talk with the very young girls, trying to warn them of the danger all around the Strip. A couple of girls nodded and said, “We know, but we’re being careful. We use the buddy system and we take down license numbers.” Others said they didn’t care, that only dumb amateurs got caught. One or two stared at me coldly as if to say “Mind your own business.”

  I had known any number of working girls in my life. I met dozens of them when I was a student intern at Hillcrest. There were absolutely beautiful girls as well as sad, homely girls there. A few years after that summer I spent “in reform school,” I ran into one of my Hillcrest girls in the bus station in Portland. She hugged me as if we were sorority sisters, and told me she had gone back to “the life.” Irene was still gorgeous and assured me she was doing well and making a lot of money. She had an older “boyfriend” who had set her up in an apartment.

  Another Hillcrest alumna was a resident in the Seattle city jail while I was a policewoman, and she shouted my name as I booked in another prisoner. Janice asked me how much I was making, and I told her “Four hundred a month.” She grinned and said, “You could make more than four hundred a week if you did what I do.”

  “But you’re in jail,” I said, “and I’m free.”

  She shrugged and smiled wider.

  It wasn’t just being free, and we both knew it. They were all living through bad times, no matter how much they protested. I think the saddest was the girl I had to arrest because a senior policewoman spotted her going into a hotel with a sailor and ordered me to follow her. I didn’t want to, because it didn’t seem fair; why should we arrest her and not him, too? The young woman limped badly and she was very pregnant. By the time we reached the room and the manager slipped his key in the lock, the sexual act, whatever it had been, was over. The “scarlet woman” was sitting in bed, eating a hamburger. She had sold herself because she was hungry. But she had broken the law, and while tears ran down her face, I took her down to be booked into jail.

  I have never forgotten her.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum was a woman in her late thirties who used the name “Jolly K.” Jolly K. had transcended a decade or more of prostitution to establish a nationwide support group for parents who battered their children. A striking woman with auburn hair and impeccable grooming, she had become highly respected when I interviewed her for a magazine article in the seventies.

  “Weren’t you ever afraid to be alone with men that you didn’t know?” I asked her, after she explained that she usually met her johns in the cocktail lounges of hotels.

  She shook her head, “No, I could tell if they were safe after talking to them for five minutes or so. I was only beaten up twice…”

  Only twice.

  DICK KRASKE’S detectives expanded their efforts and covered more and more ground as they followed up both tips and witnesses’ statements. Each missing girl had family, friends, and associates, and even if talking to them led nowhere, there was always the chance that it might.

  Dick Kraske noted that there was a positive side to the investigation, as frustrating as it was. Police and those involved in prostitution are not really natural enemies, but they view each other warily. “Usually, our people are out there trying to arrest them,” Kraske commented. “The women have their own communication system, and that’s where a lot of our information is coming from. We have been getting more help—quite a bit more—from the prostitutes than from the pimps. Some of them are very credible, and they’re very concerned.

  “They talk to each other. ‘That guy is kinky. That one is weird. I saw a gun in the pocket of the guy’s car. Stay away from him.’ They know and recognize the weirdos.”

  Now the prostitutes were running scared, and as widely diverse as their mutual goals were, the frightened women and the frustrated cops were cooperating with one another.

  There were a lot of weirdos out there. Some of the earliest theories speculated that it might be significant that the SeaTac International Airport was right in the middle of the “kill zone.” Could the killer be someone who flew in and out of Seattle? Perhaps a businessman—or even a pilot. Exploring that premise, Kraske said that his task force had issued bulletins asking for information about prostitutes who might have been murdered near other major airports in the country. If a frequent flyer was killing girls in Seattle, wouldn’t it make sense that he was doing the same thing near other airports?

  It was a good idea, but Kraske said, “We didn’t get anything back on that at all. So we still feel it is probably someone in this state.”

  Officially, there were still only six victims.

  AS SEPTEMBER turned into October, there was an obvious decline in the number of young women strolling the Pacific Highway. A lot of them were frightened, particularly when their network said that there were more missing girls than the police were talking about. It wasn’t just the Green River, which seemed distant from the SeaTac Strip to many of the girls; Giselle Lovvorn had been found murdered only a block or so off the Strip.

  AND THEN acquaintances of two more teenagers realized that they hadn’t seen the girls in their usual haunts for quite a while. One was sixteen-year-old, five-feet-seven, 125-pound Terry Rene Milligan. She had been living with her boyfriend in a motel on Pacific Highway near S. 144th Street. He reported her missing and then promptly disappeared before detectives could ask him questions. The motel manager where Terry lived said the last time she’d seen her she was arguing with another girl, allegedly over a pimp, but the witness couldn’t describe the man or the other girl. Four of the dead and missing women were white, and four, including Terry, were black.

  Terry shouldn’t have been out on the highway; she’d had so much going for her. She had been a brilliant student, and had dreams of going to Yale and studying computer science. She’d been active in her church, too, but when she became pregnant while she was still in middle school, her dreams got sidetracked. She adored her baby boy, but she dropped out of school and never went back.

  Pierce Brooks had listed characteristics he deduced about serial killers as he urged police all over America to recognize the danger. One of his findings was that serial killers murdered intraracially—that is, whites killed whites, and blacks killed blacks. There weren’t enough Asian or Indian serial killers to gather statistics. Oddly, the Green River Killer didn’t seem to have any preference about the race of his victims. No one knew yet what race he was, but his preferred victims so far were young, vulnerable women h
e apparently encountered on the highway. He hadn’t broken into homes to rape or murder women in the SeaTac area.

  But he had been more active in a shorter time in taking victims than any killer in the Northwest to date, including Bundy. The investigators learned that another girl had vanished only one day before Terry Milligan went missing. Kase Ann Lee, who happened to be white, was gone. She was sixteen, too, but the only picture available of her made her look thirty-five. Kase had once lived in the same motel as Terry Milligan, but that might be only a tenuous connection. Certain hotels and motels clustered around the airport were temporary homes to many young prostitutes.

  Kase’s husband told police she was gone from the $300-a-month apartment they shared at S. 30th and 208th South. Both Terry’s and Kase’s addresses were right in the circle where the Green River Killer prowled.

  KASE LEE was a pretty little thing, although her eyes looked old and tired in the photograph the task force had. She had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, and weighed only 105 pounds. Even as defenseless as she was, somebody had been mis-treating her. Members of her loosely knit circle of friends told detectives that she often had cuts and bruises on her face as if she had been badly beaten. She wouldn’t tell them who had done this to her.

  Two weeks earlier, police had been called to the motel where she lived in response to a fight, which did not involve Kase, and that alarmed many of the residents, most of whom avoided direct contact with law enforcement whenever possible. The task force detectives got all the information they could in their first contact, knowing that most of the witnesses would have moved on when they came back. They were right; strangers occupied the motel rooms when they returned.

  Both Kase’s husband and Terry’s boyfriend were quickly eliminated as viable suspects. It could have been anyone the teenagers had met along the SeaTac Strip, some faceless wraith who killed them and then disappeared into the fog.

  Since Mary Bridget Meehan, Terry Milligan, and Kase Lee hadn’t been found, they were not officially listed as Green River victims. There was always the chance they were alive and well in some other city.

  Their families could only hope that was true.

  8

  THE OFFICIAL GREEN RIVER toll remained at six, as investigators Dave Reichert and Bob LaMoria continued to seek out witnesses or suspects. One suspect, however, planted himself firmly in the focus of their attention. Far from avoiding detectives, an unemployed cabdriver named Melvyn Wayne Foster was anxious for the media to know that he was central to the Green River investigation. Foster, forty-three, had a rather bland face with a high-domed forehead, and he wore metal-rimmed glasses. He looked more like an accountant or a law clerk out of the thirties than a cabdriver. But he liked to present himself as a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a fight.

  And he knew the SeaTac Strip very well, just as Dick Kraske knew Foster very well. “I was a brand-new cop back in the early sixties,” Kraske remembered. “I worked in the I.D. Bureau in the old jail, and as ‘the new guy,’ I was assigned to fingerprint all the new prisoners at the mug location on C Deck. Mel was on the list that day, en route to the State Reformatory at Monroe for auto theft.”

  Kraske forgot all about Mel Foster until September 9, 1982, when Foster strolled into the Criminal Investigation Division with an offer to provide information on some of the Green River victims.

  “I assigned Reichert and LaMoria to talk with him while I checked Records to search for Mel’s name,” Kraske said. “I pulled up his fingerprint card, taken when he was nineteen years old, and my signature was on it.”

  Melvyn Foster appeared to be consumed with interest in the missing and murdered girls. He even offered the detectives his psychological theories on what the killer might be thinking. When he was asked where he got his experience as a psychologist, he said he’d “taken a couple of courses in prison.”

  Foster’s prison records indicated that he had tested above average in intelligence while he was incarcerated, but he certainly wasn’t a trained psychologist. Still, he claimed to have assisted other law enforcement agencies as an “unpaid intelligence operative.” He gave Dave Reichert and Bob LaMoria the names of two cabdrivers he considered likely suspects.

  The young detectives looked at Foster with interest, although their faces didn’t betray what they were thinking. Any astute detective knows that killers often like to be part of the probe into the murders they have committed, just as arsonists are drawn to the crowds that gather at the fires they have started.

  IN HIS CAREFULLY DRAWN OVERVIEW of similarities in the characteristics of serial killers, Pierce Brooks had already noted that many of them tend to be “police groupies,” and his supposition would be validated over the years: Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer; the Hillside Stranglers in Los Angeles in 1978—Kenneth Bianchi and his adopted cousin Angelo Buono—who killed both prostitutes and schoolgirls to feed their own sadistic fantasies; Edmund Kemper in San Jose, who murdered his grandparents, his mother, her best friend, and coeds; and Ted Bundy all enjoyed their games with the police, perhaps as much as their killing games. Some had gone so far as to apply for jobs in law enforcement. Apparently jousting with detectives was a way of extending their pride over killing and evading detection.

  Serial killers, once imprisoned, often correspond with one another, comparing tolls of human misery and competing for an awful kind of championship. Was Melvyn Foster aiming for a spot on the hierarchy of serial murder?

  He had no hope of becoming a detective, except in his own mind. He had two convictions related to auto theft and he’d served almost nine years in prison. However, he seemed to harbor no animosity toward police, and glowed with pride as he said he had come forward to assist the task force with his knowledge. He told them he was quite sure he had known five of the victims.

  “How is that?” they asked.

  “I like to hang around with street kids,” he said. “They’re out there on their own with nobody much to help them.”

  Foster painted himself as a kind of unofficial social worker who came to the aid of runaways and teenagers when they were in trouble. He laughed when he told reporters later that he had gotten acquainted with prostitutes because “I took my coffee breaks in the wrong restaurant.”

  Melvyn Foster’s interest in the young women who had gravitated to the highway wasn’t entirely altruistic. He admitted that he had also received sexual favors from some of the girls “as a way of settling the books” when they couldn’t pay their cab fares, but he stressed that he was basically a benevolent influence in their lives.

  Not surprisingly, Foster fit neatly within the parameters of the kind of killer the task force was seeking. Reichert, who was ten years younger than Foster, wasn’t nearly as streetwise as the experienced con man, and tended to see him as a prime suspect rather than as a man who craved notoriety.

  Reichert and Bob LaMoria questioned Foster extensively, and he did, indeed, become more and more interesting. First, he’d mentioned knowing some of the victims, and then he denied it, saying they must have misunderstood. When he submitted to a polygraph test on September 20, 1982, he flunked. Now he waffled, saying that he might have known them, but that he sometimes had trouble putting names and faces together.

  The two cabdrivers whose names Foster had given to the detectives also took lie detector tests. They passed. Foster backpedaled, trying to explain why his answers appeared deceptive: “I believe I have a nervous problem that causes me to flunk lie detector tests.”

  After the disappointment when Debra Bonner’s and Giselle Lovvorn’s boyfriends were cleared, it seemed that the investigators might have found the right man. Foster looked good. He knew the SeaTac Strip, had known at least some of the victims, flunked his polygraph, and was a little too fascinated with the investigation—all indicators that kept the task force detectives’ eyes on him.

  IN THE EARLY FALL, the task force had only one other viable suspect: John Norris Hanks, thirty-five, who had been convicted of
murdering his first wife’s older sister, stabbing her sixteen times. But that was only the beginning. He had served his time in Soledad Prison and was presently in jail in California on assault charges. San Francisco detectives said he was the prime suspect in six of their unsolved murders from the midseventies—all women who had been strangled.

  Hanks, a computer technician, had come to the forefront of the Green River investigation when he was arrested in East Palo Alto on a warrant charging him with assaulting his wife in Seattle. They had been married less than a month when, on September 9, she reported him to Seattle police officers after he had bound her ankles together and then choked her unconscious in their downtown Seattle apartment.

  He was smart and he’d been a perfect prisoner, but something in Hanks hated women and he had attacked both relatives and strangers. “Wherever he is,” a San Francisco police inspector commented, “women seem to end up getting killed.”

  And John Norris Hanks had been in Seattle in early July 1982—about the time the first Green River victims disappeared. On July 8, he’d rented a car at the SeaTac Airport, charging it to the company he worked for. He never returned it; the 1982 silver Camaro was found abandoned in the airport parking lot on September 23.

  King County detectives could not ignore a suspect who seemed to have a fetish for strangling women and had been in the SeaTac Airport area in the time frame of the Green River body discoveries. They traveled to San Francisco to question him, but he appeared to have a sound alibi—at least for the Seattle-area murders. People had seen him in San Francisco during the vital time period. Gradually, Hanks faded as a workable suspect in Washington State. He was sentenced to four years in prison for the assault on his bride.