Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  THAT LEFT MELVYN FOSTER in the top spot, although he apparently didn’t realize that could be dangerous to him. Still confident, Foster gave task force detectives his verbal permission to search the house in Lacey, Washington, where he lived with his father. The small, shake-sided house was fifty miles south of the SeaTac Strip. It had several sheds and outbuildings. All of the rooms were filled with furniture or tools or “stuff” of one kind or another, the possessions of an old man who had lived there for many years, along with all of Melvyn Foster’s belongings.

  It made a very long day for the searchers looking for something that might link Foster to the murdered girls. It was probably an even longer day for the man who had drawn their attention to himself. Melvyn Foster became annoyed as the hours passed and he watched the detectives and deputies poking through his father’s house. He had apparently expected them to take a cursory look and go away.

  Foster went public on October 5, 1982, announcing that he was a suspect. He invited reporters to watch the sheriff’s deputies and detectives who were watching him. “All they found were some swinging singles magazines I received unsolicited in the mail, and a bra one of my ex-wives left behind in a closet,” he told reporters afterward, with a tinge of outrage in his voice. That didn’t make him a killer.

  Speaking almost daily with television reporters, Foster was a shoo-in for a spot on the nightly news. But now he offered reasons as to why he couldn’t possibly be the Green River Killer. He pointed out that his car wasn’t drivable in mid-July and he wasn’t currently strong enough to strangle a young girl who was struggling, much less pick her body up and throw her over a riverbank; he’d been limping since March because of torn cartilage in his knee.

  With reporters jotting down his words, Foster became more garrulous and confidential. He explained how he suffered from a rare kind of “nervous autonomic tic” that always showed up on lie detector tests even when he was telling the truth.

  Foster said he had not been lucky romantically. He’d been married and divorced five times, but he said he hadn’t given up on finding love. He was thirty when he married for the first time, but it lasted only 121 days because his bride “just couldn’t stand domesticity and she just up and quietly disappeared.” He married the next year and that one lasted long enough for them to have two sons. Four years later, he divorced his second wife when she became clinically depressed and was admitted to a mental hospital. After moving back in with Melvyn and their sons, she subsequently died of an overdose of lithium.

  “We had a very special thing going for seven years,” he commented. “I miss her every day.”

  His third wife was a rebound affair and lasted less than six months. He said he’d divorced her when she slapped his two-year-old son. “That one ended on the spot,” he said firmly.

  The fourth union was even shorter—only six weeks, another rebound. Foster had taken his boys to California by then, and he said he had his paramedic’s license. He met his fifth wife in Anaheim, and she was already pregnant when he met her.

  His last wife had divorced him because she claimed he’d hurt her five-week-old baby deliberately. Foster explained what really happened. The baby had suddenly stopped breathing, and “being a trained medic, I picked her up to resuscitate her. When I grabbed her, my right hand was a little stronger than it should have been, and it inflicted six in-line fractures on her rib cage.”

  Foster said that the pediatrician at a dependency hearing had testified in his favor, but the infant was taken away from both his wife and him. (The doctor, when contacted, disagreed, saying, “She was taken away because of some injuries that shouldn’t have happened to a baby that young. The injuries were never fully explained, and the whole situation at home was not good.”)

  Between that loss and Foster’s work as a cabbie and friend to street people in Seattle, his last marriage had collapsed, too. The divorce was final in June 1982, but by that time he was already engaged to Kelly, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Port Angeles, Washington.

  His cabdriver friends acknowledged that Foster liked young girls, and said the girls had used him. “They called him a ‘Sugar Daddy,’ ” one man said, “and he’d buy them meals or clothes or give them back rubs.” Kelly, now his ex-fiancée, explained that she broke up with Foster because he’d become obsessed with a fourteen-year-old girl. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.”

  Foster admitted that his sex drive finally overcame his reservations with Kelly, but swore he had not touched any other teenagers. And he denied that he would ever hit or hurt a woman, although he didn’t back away from a fight with a man. “For many years, I have only harmed men in defending the helpless, or, with no reasonable alternative, myself, and with the aggressor on the ground, I would end the incident by walking away; murder is not in me to commit.”

  Ending his press conference on a positive note, Melvyn Foster said he was corresponding with a pretty twenty-three-year-old bartender in West Virginia who was interested in moving to Washington State to marry him if they could raise the money for travel and a place of their own. “You get those daughters of a coal miner’s family and you’ve got somebody who will stick it out with you, so I think I’m going to go for it,” he said with a grin.

  Despite his obvious enjoyment at being newsworthy, Melvyn Foster’s efforts to join the investigation had brought him a lot more attention than he expected, and it wasn’t positive attention. It would be a safe bet to believe he regretted ever coming forward to “help” in the first place.

  He complained to the cameras that the task force members had made a terrible “mess” when they searched his house. “That was interesting to watch on TV,” Dick Kraske remembered, “because I personally instructed the crime scene specialists and everyone else there to put things back in order before we left. We even washed all of the coffee cups we had dusted—with negative results—and hung them back on the rack in the kitchen.”

  As incensed as he claimed to be, Melvyn Foster always seemed to be there, a presence at the edge of the Green River probe, as if he couldn’t stay away. Green River detectives now placed him under surveillance for at least three weeks, monitoring all his movements twenty-four hours a day.

  The officers who kept track of him noted that he met with another prominent figure in the investigation most evenings at the Ebb Tide restaurant in Kent, just a few hundred feet from the Green River, to share confidences and cocktails.

  Barbara Kubik-Patten was a middle-aged housewife, mother, and self-styled psychic/private detective. She had inserted herself into the investigation even before Foster. Indeed, on the Sunday in August when investigators pulled three bodies from the Green River, Dick Kraske had looked up to see two Kent detectives approaching on either side of a woman. The woman, Kubik-Patten, had somehow heard of the body retrieval. She had prevailed upon the Kent investigators to take her to the river.

  Convinced that she had had visions of murder that had come true, she would continue to insist that she could be vitally important to the Green River Task Force. Kubik-Patten would not have been particularly memorable except for the fact that she and Foster spent a lot of time together, and she kept appearing on both the SeaTac Strip and on the banks of the Green River.

  Although she was not known in psychic circles in the Seattle area, Kubik-Patten insisted that she “saw” and “heard” things that ordinary people didn’t. She told Dave Reichert that she was quite sure she had picked up Opal Mills sometime during the summer while the teenager was hitchhiking.

  Later, on July 14, something had drawn Kubik-Patten to the Green River. She said she had seen a small pale-colored car there, and heard screams. The name “Opal” or “Opel” had vibrated over and over in her head. Sometimes, Kubik-Patten said, she had chased after the mysterious car, and sometimes she recalled only that it had been parked near the river and then sped away, distancing itself from her so that she couldn’t catch up. She now believed devoutly that she must have been present when Opal Mills was be
ing murdered.

  It is a rare detective who gives much credence to psychic visions. All of their training teaches them to look for what can be proven and demonstrated in a court of law, something that can be seen, felt, touched, even smelled. Psychics tend to “see” landmarks like “mountains” and “trees” and “water,” and Washington State is rife with all three.

  Barbara Kubik-Patten’s precognition seemed to be more precise, but her timing was questionable. Was she simply “remembering” something that was now fairly common knowledge after a media blitz on the Green River cases? Or had she actually been at the location where the bodies of Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Marcia Chapman had been found?

  Kubik-Patten called Dave Reichert and Detective Fae Brooks every few days with new insights and predictions, making herself a constant thorn in their sides and actually hampering them from doing their work. She herself became supremely frustrated when she felt they weren’t taking her seriously, which, in all truth, they weren’t. She was a nervous, intrusive presence when they needed every minute they had to follow up real tips and possible witnesses. Worse, she was probably contaminating possible witnesses’ memories as she planted herself on the Strip and began to play detective herself.

  Kubik-Patten was particularly interested in solving Opal’s murder, feeling that she had a psychic connection to Opal. She was a frequent visitor at the Mills home, and conferred often with Robert Mills. Garrett Mills remembered her visits.

  “She used to tape Melvyn, trying to trap him into saying something that would incriminate him. Then she would bring the tapes over and play them for my father. There were some awful things on those tapes, and I sometimes think that she forgot that she was playing them for a victim’s father. Finally, my father got mad at her and threw her out.”

  Kubik-Patten told detectives she had learned that Opal had spent a few nights at the Economy Inn on S. 192nd and 28th Avenue South, a motel within walking distance of Angle Lake Park, where Opal had placed her last phone call—a collect call—to her mother on August 12.

  When they followed up on that, the investigators found that Opal had never been registered there, although Cynthia “Cookie” Hinds had. Probably Opal had stayed overnight with her on occasion.

  Like Melvyn Foster, Kubik-Patten appeared to crave attention, and she had an uncanny sense of when reporters might be visiting a site. Whenever something brought the media to the Green River’s banks, she was always there—watching and searching—and she was not averse to approaching and interrupting their coverage.

  How Foster and Kubik-Patten met is a mystery, but they soon joined forces, making a curious couple who were rendezvousing not for romance but to discuss how they could solve the Green River murders.

  Kubik-Patten became familiar to the media and thrived on that. One day in the fall of 1982, at the request of a writer-editor from a national magazine, I was at the Green River shoreline near where Wendy Coffield’s body had been discovered. Barbara Kubik-Patten appeared as if she had levitated from the thick reeds along the bank. She told the writer about her astounding knowledge that came from another level of consciousness, and was disappointed when he didn’t ask her to pose for the photographer who accompanied us.

  Some time later, Barbara phoned and invited me to join her and Foster at the Ebb Tide for cocktail hour, curiously assuring me, “Melvyn won’t hurt you as long as I’m there.” I demurred.

  Whether Foster was pumping Kubik-Patten for information, or she felt she was interrogating him while they sipped cocktails, they were a constant couple in the smoky lounge near the first body sites.

  But by late fall 1982, Foster had had enough police attention. He announced that he no longer wanted to be involved in the Green River cases. He called reporters to issue more statements.

  “I feel like I’ve got absolutely nothing to hide because I haven’t done anything,” he said angrily. “I think they are reacting to some substantial pressure on the cost of [my] surveillance. There have been no murders connected with the Green River mess in the last two and a half months, so why do they want to pull a second search of my house, outbuildings, and property? It’s beyond me.”

  After their surveillance teams reported that Melvyn Foster was spending a great deal of time near the Green River, detectives had decided to undertake a more widespread search of his father’s house and property. With a search warrant, they removed several more items, including letters from Foster’s former wife and his new girlfriend in West Virginia, along with some nude photographs of two young Seattle women, neither of whom matched known Green River victims.

  “Some guy who drives a hack mailed those to me last week,” Foster complained. “He was trying to frame me.”

  The calendar on Melvyn Foster’s living room wall noted dates in July when he’d taken his car in for repairs, and detectives took that, too, along with some hair samples. Explorer Search and Rescue scouts and dogs searched the Fosters’ house and property in a wide range around it. They didn’t find anything that seemed to have evidentiary value, and they certainly didn’t turn up any bodies.

  Still, Foster seemed hesitant to give up his status as a suspect, and the cachet that went with it, as he told reporters he had no knowledge of the slayings or the killer. “I would like to get my hands on the man who did [it],” he added, vehemently.

  He hinted that he was thinking about hiring a lawyer because his civil rights had been violated by being watched constantly. He told reporters that he had prepared a six-page protest that he was sending to the F.B.I.

  As Thanksgiving approached, with their two top suspects fading on them, there were only two detectives assigned to work full time on the Foster aspect of the Green River case. Six uniformed officers worked in teams around the clock, keeping track of Melvyn Foster’s comings and goings. But Dick Kraske admitted, “We can’t watch him for the rest of his life.”

  Officially, Melvyn Foster’s visibility in the Green River investigation diminished until he was yesterday’s news, but Barbara Kubik-Patten was still convinced that she had the power to find the Green River Killer.

  Dave Reichert, however, couldn’t let go of Foster as a suspect—too many things matched. He spent his own off-duty time checking on what Foster was up to, and often took the long drive to Olympia, which enraged the now-out-of-work cabdriver. Foster singled Reichert out as the detective he hated the most.

  9

  MELVYN FOSTER was right in focusing on Dave Reichert as an enemy. Although he had been in the Major Crimes Unit for less than two years in 1982, the young detective was relentless in his determination to catch the Green River Killer. Reichert tracked Foster, often taking time away from his wife and three small children to do so. In 1982, they were all under ten, and family meant a lot to Reichert.

  Dave Reichert was the oldest of seven brothers. He was born in Minnesota, although his devoutly religious parents moved to Renton, Washington, a year later. His maternal grandfather was a Lutheran minister, and his father’s dad was a town marshal. Two of his brothers would grow up to be state troopers. The young detective attended Concordia Lutheran College in Portland, Oregon, on a small football scholarship. He met his wife, Julie, there and they eventually had three children: Angela, Tabitha, and Daniel. Reichert coached a grade school football team even before he and Julie had children. He and his family were familiar faces in their church.

  Reichert had come close to losing his own life while on duty. Answering a call about a man holed up in a house, he had underestimated his dangerousness. The suspect sliced Reichert’s throat with a razor-sharp knife, barely missing the carotid artery on one side. If he had cut just a little deeper, Reichert could have bled to death.

  Dave Reichert loved his job and he was full of energy at thirty-one. He believed devoutly that one day he would catch the Green River Killer. So did many other detectives and officers in the King County Sheriff’s Office.

  It didn’t seem possible that one man, or even two men working together, could k
ill a half-dozen women and get away with it for long. Surely mistakes and missteps would be made, and they would have him.

  AS THE CHANCE of connecting Melvyn Foster absolutely to the victims grew dimmer, any number of suspects bubbled to the surface of the investigators’ awareness that fall of 1982.

  Kent had a disturbing case that began on October 5, a disappearance that had both similarities to and differences from the Green River victims. Geri Slough, twenty, left her Kent apartment early that morning to go to a job interview. Along with fifty other women, she had answered an ad that appeared in several south-end papers seeking a receptionist for a company called Comp Tec. Geri had circled the ad that listed a phone number and an address.

  She was heading toward that address on 30th Avenue South to meet the company owner: “Carl Johnson.” He had sounded like a nice man on the phone, and had been encouraging about her chances of being hired.

  But Geri Slough never returned to her apartment, and she didn’t call her friends to report on her interview. Her car turned up the next day in the Park-and-Ride lot just a block off the south end of the SeaTac Strip in Des Moines. Her purse and some of her bloody clothing were discovered in South Pierce County—almost on the Thurston County line. This location was some forty miles from where her car was abandoned, but in an almost straight line down the Pacific Highway.

  Three days later, on October 14, a fisherman found Geri Slough’s body floating in Alder Lake. She had been shot in the head. Geri Slough had absolutely no connection to prostitution, and the manner of her murder was different from the strangled Green River victims, but her age matched and the location of her disappearance matched.

  Kent detectives tracked down the address in the “Help Wanted” ad and found the Realtor who had rented the office space to the Comp Tec owner. Carl Johnson had leased this tiny office, but the phone he used was in a nearby phone booth. In the office, the investigators discovered a large section of carpet that was saturated with dried blood. The crime lab tested it and found it was Type A. Geri Slough had Type A blood.