by Ann Rule
For the second time, detectives had the description of a vehicle (beyond the small white car Barbara Kubik-Patten said she saw by the Green River). Again, it was a pickup truck. Kimi-Kai’s boyfriend described an older green truck with a camper on the back and primer paint on the passenger door. He thought it was either a Ford or a Dodge.
Halfway into April 1983, and two more teenagers had failed to come back or to call anyone they knew. The trucks’ descriptions were printed in Seattle papers, but the investigators weren’t too hopeful that it would help. There were a lot of older trucks, some of them green, some blue, some brown and tan, and a whole lot of them with primer spots.
FOR SOME REASON murder victims and most serial killers are often referred to in the media by their first, middle, and last names. Is it, perhaps, to give the victims dignity? As for the killers, is it to distinguish them from other men with similar names? Or does it, unfortunately, imbue them with extra infamy? Theodore Robert Bundy, Coral Eugene Watts, Jerome Henry Brudos, Harvey Louis Carignan, John Wayne Gacy.
Hearing the full names of the hapless teenagers who encountered the Green River Killer could not help but evoke thoughts of how short a time had passed since they were tiny babies, whose parents lovingly picked out enchanting names, with carefully chosen middle names, in the hope that their daughters’ lives would unfold like flowers. Even parents whose own lives had been bruised with disappointment hoped for a better future for their children.
Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s mother, Joyce, loved her baby’s name so much that she embroidered it on her sheets and blankets. In Hawaiian, it meant “golden sea at dawn.”
Talking with veteran Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Mike Barber, Joyce Pitsor described Kimi-Kai as a petite girl who loved unicorns and anything purple. Like many girls her age, she hit a defiant streak almost at the very moment she entered puberty. She fell in love with a boy and wanted to be with him more than her mother thought prudent. Railing against curfews and rules, Kimi left home in February 1983 to move in with her boyfriend, but she called her mother every week.
“Kimi was very adventurous,” Joyce remembered. “She wasn’t afraid. She wanted to see how life worked and never took anyone’s word for anything. She had to see for herself. I remember telling her, ‘Be a little girl for a while. Enjoy yourself. You have all the time to be a grown-up with all those problems.’ But she wanted to be an adult so bad.”
And now, Kimi-Kai was gone. If anyone had ever viewed her as tough, her mom knew better. “She could put on the most bravado routine, especially if she was terrified. What it really was was bordering on hysteria.” Joyce Pitsor had seen that when she rushed down to juvenile court to stand by Kimi-Kai when she was in trouble.
Now, waiting for word was torturous for her mother, who had already lost two of her children—one at birth and one as an infant. She was a woman who loved kids; she had adopted three biracial children because she did care so much. But she hadn’t been able to convince her own daughter to wait just a few years before she plunged into the adult world.
And within only two months of “freedom,” Kimi-Kai was gone, too.
THE NEW WEST MOTEL was on the Des Moines end of Pac HiWay across 216th to the north of the Three Bears, with a convenience store between them.
SOMETIME in the third week of April, Gail Lynn Mathews, twenty-four, registered at the New West. Gail was an exotic-looking woman with luxuriant black hair. Her most distinctive feature was her extremely full, lush mouth. She was living with a thirty-four-year-old man from Texas named Curt, whom she’d met at Trudy’s Tavern near the airport in 1982. At that time, she’d had a little apartment across from Trudy’s, but she lost it when she couldn’t make the rent in February 1983. For weeks after that, Gail lived a week or two at a time with friends of friends of friends.
Except that she was older than most of the Green River victims, Gail Mathews’s lifestyle was similar to theirs. She had been married, but she was either divorced or separated by the spring of 1983, and she was down on her luck.
Neither Gail nor Curt had much money or permanent jobs; they drifted while he gambled in card rooms and she nursed a beer in the bar, waiting to see if he’d win enough for a meal and motel. Curt’s extensive vocabulary reflected his intelligence and education, but either drugs or alcohol had sidetracked him. His regular haunts were the White Shutters, Trudy’s, and the Midway Tavern. Now and then, Gail contributed money to the kitty. She never told Curt where she got it, and he never asked. Their lives had become a day-to-day existence. They had no car and no permanent residence.
On the last night Curt saw Gail, things were normal—for them. They had stayed in the New West for a few days, but their rent was up and they were both broke. On the night of April 22, they were in the VIP Tavern a few blocks north of their motel. They shared a couple of beers while Curt played Pac Man. Gail watched him, not talking to anyone else in the tavern.
Finally, Curt decided to head to the Midway Tavern, which was across the Kent–Des Moines Road from the Texaco station and the Blockhouse Restaurant. He hoped they had a poker game going there, and he’d have a lucky night.
Gail told him she would try to find a way to keep their motel room for another night or two. He walked away from the VIP Tavern, leaving her there alone; she knew the woman bartender. It was more than a mile to the Midway, so Curt decided to catch a bus. He waited at the familiar intersection at 216th and the Pac HiWay. Idly, he watched traffic and noted a blue or possibly green Ford pickup passing. It wasn’t new by any stretch of the imagination, but it was noticeable because it had so many sanded “circular” marks on it, as if it was primed for a paint job.
Curt was startled to see Gail sitting in the passenger seat beside a man with light hair who appeared to be in his early thirties. He was wearing a plaid shirt that made him look like an “outdoorsman.”
Curt’s arm was half lifted to wave at Gail when he was surprised by the way she looked. “She seemed dazed,” he would tell F.B.I. agent “Duke” Dietrich later. “She was staring straight ahead. It was bizarre. She was looking right at me, but it was as if she didn’t see me. I’m sure she could see me—it wasn’t dark out yet.”
He waved harder, but Gail didn’t respond. If she was trying to signal him that she was in some kind of trouble, he couldn’t decipher it. She was sitting far away from the driver, right next to the passenger door. He watched as the truck turned left and disappeared. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Curt said, “but I felt fear—fear for her because I sensed she was in danger. I ran across the road toward the truck and tried to catch up with it, but the driver made a left turn and sped up.”
Curt had watched helplessly as the truck disappeared. The bus came by and he got on, telling himself that he was overreacting. He spent an hour at the Midway Tavern, but nobody wanted to play poker, so he trudged back to their motel room. He watched the highway for a long time, waiting for car lights to turn into the motel or the sound of Gail’s footsteps scrunching the gravel. There were a few cars, but Gail didn’t come back that night.
Curt called 911 to report her missing. He said later that he was told that he couldn’t make an official missing person’s report because he was not related to her.
Curt waited for Gail to come back or leave a message for him at the motel office, but there was nothing. He stopped at all the places along the highway where they’d gone together. No one remembered seeing Gail recently. He couldn’t help it; his mind turned to thoughts about the Green River Killer. Both he and Gail were aware of the missing and murdered girls, but she had never been afraid. He’d warned her about hitchhiking, too, but she told him not to worry about that—she could take care of herself.
He wondered now why Gail had looked so strangely at him—or, rather, through him—when he waved at her. Somehow, the man behind the wheel must have been controlling her. Maybe he was holding a knife against her body so she didn’t dare cry out. Maybe a gun. Why else would she have not even waved or smiled at him?<
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They’d been together for almost a year, and they’d become close. Curt didn’t buy the idea that Gail would simply leave him with no explanation. It was true they hadn’t had much money, and life was tough for them, but they had always believed that if they pulled together, they could get out of the hole they were in and build a better life. But drugs were important to Curt, too, and eventually he moved on, unsure of what had happened to Gail.
By the time an investigator knew what had become of Gail and tracked Curt down, he was an inmate in a Texas prison. When he was returned to Seattle to be interviewed by Dr. John Berberich, the Seattle Police Department’s psychologist, Curt agreed readily to be hypnotized. Maybe there was something hidden in his subconscious that would help catch her killer. A license number or a more complete description of the truck and driver.
Despite their best efforts, Curt could recall nothing beyond the odd, frozen look on Gail’s face the last time he saw her.
EIGHT DAYS after Curt saw Gail Mathews in a stranger’s truck, that same intersection was the scene of an apparent abduction. Marie Malvar was eighteen, a beautiful Filipina, the cherished daughter of a large family. They didn’t know she was out there on the highway at S. 216th, near the Three Bears Motel, trusting that she was safe because her boyfriend, Richie,* was with her to note which cars she got into and to make sure she came back safely in a reasonable time.
The young couple watched as a dark truck approached the intersection from the south. As it pulled over, they could see a spot on the passenger door that glowed lighter than the rest of the truck, a coat of primer paint. Marie spoke to the driver, nodded, and then got in and the stranger’s vehicle pulled onto the highway again.
As he usually did, Richie followed, keeping pace, and then pulling alongside. From her gestures, it appeared to him that Marie was upset. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but it looked as though she wanted to get out of the truck. The driver slowed down, but only to turn around in a motel parking lot and then accelerated as he headed south. Richie did the same, but he didn’t make the light at S. 216th. It turned red and he had to stop. He watched as the pickup truck turned left and headed east—in the direction of the Green River. As soon as the light changed, Richie turned left, too.
Because he was less than a minute behind the pickup, Richie thought it was strange when he saw no taillights ahead, neither going down the Earthworks hill on 216th, nor headed north or south on Military Road, which ran parallel to the highway. Tossing a coin in his head, he drove south on Military, but there were no vehicles at all between the intersection and the Kent–Des Moines Road a few miles south. There didn’t seem to be anyplace the truck could have turned off, because Military and the I-5 Freeway were so close together and there were no on-ramps along that section.
Richie didn’t see the almost invisible street sign that led to a narrow cul-de-sac on the right side of Military Road. It was easy to miss, especially in the dark. Bewildered, he drove back to the parking lot to wait for the guy in the truck to bring Marie back.
But he never did.
Because he and Marie had been engaged in prostitution, Richie was hesitant to go to the police. He was just as nervous about telling her father, Jose, because he feared his wrath when he learned that Richie had let Marie take such chances. Still, when four days went by with no word from her, Richie went to the Des Moines Police Department. There, he talked to Detective Sergeant Bob Fox. Richie reported Marie as missing, but he didn’t tell the whole truth about what he and Marie had been doing out on the highway. If he had, Fox, who had investigated many homicides in the city of Des Moines, and who was well aware of the Green River cases, would have reacted differently. Instead, Richie’s evasiveness made Fox wonder if he hadn’t harmed his girlfriend himself, or, more likely, Marie Malvar and Richie might have had a fight and she’d left him on her own.
Jose Malvar was very concerned. Marie wasn’t a girl who stayed away from home for long, and she called frequently. Now there was only silence. Jose picked up Richie and said they were going to find her, demanding to know just where she and Richie had been when she disappeared.
Jose, Richie, and Marie’s brother, James, started at the intersection where Richie had seen the pickup truck pull away. They inched east on 216th, down the long winding hill, and then back and forth along Military Road. They were looking for some sign of Marie, or the truck with the primer spot on the passenger door. They checked driveways and carports. There weren’t many houses on the west side of Military Road going north—only a new motel sandwiched in a narrow slice of land just off an I-5 Freeway ramp. But when they headed south, there were many modestly priced homes on both sides of the road.
On May 3, the trees were all leafed out and dogwood, cherry, and apple trees were blooming. After making several passes, they finally spotted a street sign on the right side of the road: S. 220th Place. Turning in, they found an almost hidden residential street, a cul-de-sac with eight or ten little ranch houses. In the driveway of a house near the north end of the street, they all saw it: an old pickup truck. They got close enough to look at the passenger door. It had a primer splotch on it.
They immediately called the Des Moines Police Department, and Bob Fox responded. He and another detective knocked on the door while Marie’s father, brother, and boyfriend watched. Fox was talking to someone, nodding, asking another question, and nodding again. Finally, the front door shut and the Des Moines detectives walked slowly down the walk.
“He says there’s no woman in there,” Fox told Jose Malvar. “Hasn’t been a woman in there.”
The man who said he was the owner had struck the police as straightforward enough, and he hadn’t been nervous, just curious about why the police were knocking on his door. Fox didn’t even know if his was the same truck Richie had seen, and he hadn’t pushed his questioning very hard. There was no probable cause to search the small house whose rear yard backed up to the bank that sloped to the freeway. The guy who lived there was friendly but firm when he said he lived there alone, had just bought the house, in fact.
Her boyfriend and relatives who were searching for Marie Malvar watched the house for a while, frustrated and anxious. Was Marie in there? Had she ever been? They fought back the urge to go up and pound on the door themselves, but, finally, they drove away. Still, they came back at odd times to check. It was the closest they could be to Marie, or at least they thought so. Where else could they look?
DETECTIVES were inclined to believe that none of the men who had driven battered pickup trucks was likely to be the killer they sought. With both Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s and Marie Malvar’s last sightings, the girls’ boyfriends were positive that the drivers had seen them watching. It didn’t make sense that a killer would be brazen enough to take that kind of chance. It was more likely that Kimi-Kai and Marie had met someone else after they got out of the trucks.
One murdered girl, who was found near Pac HiWay and S. 216th almost a year before and who had seemed to fit into the Green River victim profile turned out to be an unrelated victim. The Green River Killer wasn’t the only dangerous man trolling for victims in the Seattle area. Patricia Jo Crossman was working as a prostitute and, like the others, she was in her midteens when she died violently, her body tossed from a balcony into bushes. Thirty-year-old Thomas Armstrong III, who was arrested and prosecuted for that crime, tried to convince Judge Robert Dixon that Patty Jo’s death was related to the Green River murders, even attempting to link his ex-wife, Opie, to the killings. The ex-wife’s apartment house was burned down a month after Patty Jo’s murder.
It took two trials to convict him, but prosecutor Linda Walton argued that detectives had found absolutely no connection to the Green River cases. There was, however, overwhelming evidence that Armstrong had killed Patty Jo on April 8, 1982.
On April 8, 1983, Armstrong was sentenced to life in prison.
And the real Green River Killer still roamed free, taking more victims, most of whom simply disappeared f
rom the motels and streets where it was normal for them to be around for a time and then be gone. Their friends assumed that they had simply moved on.
13
WITH THE KNOWLEDGE that we have today, the so-called Green River Killer, whoever he was, seemed to be in a homicidal frenzy, proceeding along the path that serial killers so often take. For them, murder is addictive, and it takes more and more of the “substance” to satisfy them, or to make them feel, as two infamous serial murderers have said, “normal.”
AS THE WEATHER grew warmer, his pace increased. Martina Theresa Authorlee, nineteen, was at the prize spot near the Red Lion on May 22, 1983, but not on May 23 or any day after. Born in West Germany where her father was in the army, Martina had moved back to the United States with her parents in 1968 to live on the sprawling Fort Lewis Army Base south of Tacoma. Her ambition was to have a service career, too, and she had joined the National Guard and left for six weeks of basic training in 1982. But she was given a medical discharge and never completed her time in South Carolina. After that, she seemed to lose direction. Without explaining to her parents what had happened, she moved to Hillsboro, Oregon, that summer, but she still called home twice a month.
Martina came home for Mother’s Day, 1983, and spent some time with her family. As far as they knew, she intended to go back to Oregon after her few days’ visit. She told them she had a job, but they didn’t know what she did. Nor did they know that she had been arrested for prostitution and served two days in jail in Seattle. They sensed she was troubled, but she was a girl who kept her thoughts to herself.
Assuming she was back in Oregon, they weren’t unduly worried until they heard nothing more from her, not even at Christmas.