by Ann Rule
The pretty little girl had her own horse and riding lessons, music lessons, weeks in exclusive summer camps where other rich girls went, and orthodonture that corrected her slight overbite. Her hair was brown then, and her grade school pictures show her smiling carefully so her braces wouldn’t show.
As her stepfather’s business acumen increased, both of Keli’s parents worked long hours. She often spent more time with a babysitter and housekeeper than she did with her mother and stepfather, but she was a bright child and she got A’s in school and won spelling bees. She was lonely a lot of the time, but she adored her mother and was especially happy when they were together.
“We were very, very close,” her mother told Elizabeth Rhodes many years later. “I loved her as a daughter, but she was also fun to do things with. The best thing about Keli was her wonderful personality. She had a witty personality, quick and sharp.”
The small family had lots of good times—trips to Hawaii and Mexico, cruising on their fifty-foot yacht from Elliott Bay to the San Juan Islands—and mother and daughter had all the wonderful clothes they wanted. It was a lifestyle few Seattleites enjoyed. It lasted only five years. Then her mother and stepfather divorced, and the life that Keli Kay had thrived in was over, a quick curtain dropping down on her world of privilege. She and her mother went back to an ordinary existence.
She was almost eleven then, a particularly disturbing time for young girls. More than the wealth and all that came with it, Keli Kay had to feel that her stepfather had divorced her, too. Her father had left her, and now another father figure walked away from her. To salve her own feelings, she blamed her mother for the divorce.
Quite soon, her mother married again. This stepfather wasn’t rich and he wasn’t very nice. Her mother came home from work early one day and caught him throwing a rocking chair at Keli. Her leg was already bruised from a beating with a wooden coat hanger. That was the end of that marriage; her mother would not allow anyone to hurt Keli.
Keli was thirteen, an age when even girls in stable families act out and become “different people.” Any parent of a teenage daughter can attest to that. And Keli had lost too much, too rapidly. Her grades dropped and she began to run away from home—but only for a day or two. She, who had always been an obedient and fun child to be around, became sullen and defiant. She was still smart and still creative, but she saw the world through a dark cloud now. Life had betrayed her.
Keli had also suffered the worst experience any young teen can. She was babysitting when she answered the door without checking to see who was there. It was five teenage boys, drunk and rowdy. They pushed their way in and Keli went through a horrendous ordeal of sexual attack—a gang rape.
At three AM, her mother got a call to come to a Seattle hospital and found her thirteen-year-old daughter traumatized to the point that she couldn’t speak. Keli had known some of the boys and was afraid of them, because they were leaders in the wilder crowd at a local high school. If she agreed to testify against them in court, she thought they would hurt her more. And besides, she was ashamed.
Keli wrote a poem a little while later, a poem her mother didn’t find until she had run away from home for good. Elizabeth Rhodes quoted it in her article:
“Looking back through the pages of yesterday,
All the childhood dreams that drifted away
Even the box of crayons on the shelf
Reflect bits and pieces of myself…
She was only fourteen when she wrote that, regretting that she “had to grow up.” Her life as she knew it was over, and there were hints that growing up hadn’t been the usual maturation that the years bring. She ended her poem:
“But I know now in my heart and mind
I had to leave it all behind
And as a tear comes slowly to my eye,
I stop and ask myself,
Why?”
—Keli K. McGinness
And then Keli McGinness was on the streets, as if somehow the pain would lessen there. She bleached her hair and wore clothes that played up her D-cup bust. If you can call it that, she was a success, working the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, The Camp in Portland, and coming home to Seattle’s Strip. She fell in love with an African American boy two years older than she, and she was pregnant at fifteen.
Keli Kay carried two babies to term before she was eighteen. Unlike Mary Bridget’s, both of Keli Kay’s babies survived.
Did Keli herself survive? Probably not; her status is still in limbo. Her first baby, a boy, was born in California. She brought him home to Seattle to show to his two grandmothers. His paternal grandmother offered to look after him, but Keli decided that he should be adopted, and he was.
But both teenage parents regretted that, and within six months, Keli was pregnant again. They had planned this baby as much as they were capable of planning in a lifestyle that involved constantly moving and living in cheap motels. Somehow they thought that keeping this second baby would make their love stronger and impress their families that they were mature.
It was a little girl, a lovely baby girl who combined the most attractive features of both her young parents. Again, the father’s mother was willing to help raise her, but Keli’s mother had never been able to accept her daughter’s boyfriend. She blamed him for Keli’s lifestyle, and she was opposed to a biracial union. Keli told her she was prejudiced, which she was, but only because of what she felt Keli’s lover had done to her.
She had pleaded in vain with Keli to leave the streets. She didn’t have to have a pimp/boyfriend. Her mother would help her. They were still friends as well as mother and daughter, although Keli was the worldly-wise one as her mother struggled to cope with what Keli had become. Still, they stayed in touch with each other, talking in the way people do whose experiences with life barely touched. They loved each other, but they couldn’t help each other.
Keli tried to explain, “I’m a prostitute, Mom. How could I ever make the kind of money I am making now doing anything else?”
As her acquaintances from The Camp recalled, Keli did make top dollar. When it wasn’t raining and cold out, the girls in Portland and Seattle could bring in more than $3,000 a week, although most of it was turned over to their pimps. Ironically, Keli’s childhood, when she had moved easily among the wealthier members of Seattle society, gave her a polished image that attracted the richest johns.
But she couldn’t do that and take care of her four-month-old baby girl, too. She was doing fine so far, and between Keli and her boyfriend, someone was always with her. But Keli knew she wasn’t in a position to be a full-time mother. She took her baby to a religion-based child-care agency. No, she did not want to put her up for adoption. Keli asked that she be placed in a foster home, but just long enough for her to serve some jail time for an earlier prostitution arrest that was hanging over her head. She couldn’t say exactly when she would be back to pick up the baby, but she insisted she was coming back. There was no longer someone in either her family or her boyfriend’s family who was able to care for the infant, although they all said they loved her.
Keli McGinness showed up at the jail on May 25 and served her seven days, secure in her knowledge that her baby was already safe in a foster home.
Although both their parents disapproved—his mother was unable to even say the word prostitution—Keli’s boyfriend picked her up from jail in his six-year-old Cadillac convertible and they drove to Portland, a regular pattern along “the circuit” for them. He waited in a restaurant lounge, as he always did, for Keli to come back with the money she had earned. As all the “boyfriends” of the missing women have said, he “really loved her” and worried about her, afraid she might meet some weirdo.
Keli herself felt fairly safe, even though she knew about the Green River Killer. She would not get into cars; she took tricks to motel rooms that she rented. She told people who loved her and cops who arrested her that “It won’t happen to me.”
Keli considered arrests part of the cost of doi
ng business, and she was philosophical about fines and the jail time she occasionally had to serve. By adroitly changing her names, birth dates, and identification, she managed to skate free many times because the arresting officers couldn’t find her current name in their records. But sometimes she got caught, and she would shrug her shoulders and accept the law’s edicts, laughing as she said, “You got me!” She knew most of the vice detectives and she was polite with them, accepting the fact that sometimes it was their turn to win.
The vice cops did win in Portland on June 21, 1983, and Keli spent three days in jail in Oregon. Her legal schedule was crushing, though, and she had to be back in Seattle for a court appearance on June 28. She told her attorney that she would be back in time for that, but she didn’t show up, and the judge ordered a bench warrant for her arrest. According to her boyfriend, they had come back to Seattle, but for some reason Keli didn’t want to go to court. Instead, they spent that day together.
And then Keli checked into the Three Bears Motel. The desk clerk verified that. Her room cost about $22. A little after nine, she was on Pac HiWay, strolling down toward the Blockhouse Restaurant where the clientele, mostly Des Moines residents attracted by the prime rib, fried chicken, and the senior citizen discount, were having dessert, or sitting in the crowded bar as the live entertainment began. She wouldn’t have found any johns there, but cars coming off the I-5 Freeway at the Kent–Des Moines exit would slow down at the sight of her.
Keli McGinness never returned to pick up her baby girl from the church agency. The baby’s father said he didn’t get any of the messages that the agency left for him. Their fourteen-month-old daughter was too young to know that her mother was gone, and there was no one else in the family who could take care of her. Keli’s baby girl was adopted when no one came for her.
Keli’s mother hadn’t seen her since Mother’s Day, 1981, when Keli drove to eastern Washington to see her. She hoped against hope that her daughter had decided to get lost somewhere far away. At least that would mean she was alive.
17
DURING the summer of 1983, the newspapers around Seattle ran a lot of stories about women who might or might not be missing, but they were seldom on the front page. And no two articles tabulated the same names. Some said a dozen were missing; other coverage wondered if it might be as many as nineteen. And they all vastly underrated the inherent danger of a deadly hunter who roved unchecked throughout King County. Somehow, he was still blending into the background, never drawing attention to himself.
Keli McGinness was the last to disappear in June, as far as the police knew. Coincidentally, the next girl on the list was also named Kelly, although she spelled it differently. She resembled all the other young women in that she was blessed with the freshness of youth, even those whose only photos were mug shots where they looked tired and sad.
Kelly Ware, twenty-three, smiled happily in the pictures her family had. She had long dark hair and huge brown eyes. She disappeared on July 18, 1983. Just like Cheryl Wims, Kelly was last seen in the central district in Seattle, an ethnically mixed neighborhood a few miles east of downtown, where streets crested and then plunged down a long hill toward the shores of Lake Washington.
IT HAD BEEN almost exactly a year since the first five bodies were found in the Green River, and yet the only other victim to be located who seemed to be linked to the GRK was Giselle Lovvorn, the self-confident blonde, who had a genius I.Q. and had been discovered in the deserted property area south of the airport. Surely, there were so many more lost girls out there somewhere, calling out silently to be found.
Now, slowly, as if the earth itself were aware of the dread anniversary, it began to give up the pathetic remains of more victims who had been left there.
On August 11, 1983, a couple, who had gone to pick apples from abandoned trees in the same overgrown yards where Giselle Lovvorn was left, stumbled across bones behind three empty houses. They hurried to call the sheriff’s office.
What lay behind the shells of homes was merely a skeleton, still partially covered with brush and trash, much of it scattered by animals. But there was a skull, too. That could help immeasurably in identifying whose remains they were.
While anxious families watched and tensely waited, Dick Kraske spoke carefully to reporters. Yes, his office had some possibilities of matching the dental work of the deceased to known and suspected victims. The task force had compiled records from as many dentists’ charts as possible.
The Green River victims, however, weren’t the only missing persons near the airport. One long-unsolved mystery was the disappearance of Joyce Kennedy, a Pan American ticket agent, who had walked away from her counter after finishing her shift way back in 1976. She had never been found. Port of Seattle detectives had preserved her records for seven years.
Dick Kraske still didn’t comment to reporters on a specific number of possible victims in the Green River cases because, quite frankly, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. In August 1983, many who were gone had yet to be reported as missing. Kraske noted that, officially, there were seven young women missing—which, when added to the six girls who were known to be dead, made thirteen. But three of the missing hadn’t been gone long enough to be in the state of complete decomposition that the apple tree victim was.
Dental charts showed matches to the skull that established the identity of Shawnda Leea Summers. Shawnda, who had once lived in Bellevue, had been missing since either October 7 or 8 in 1982. Her family had looked for her in vain for ten months, and it was likely that she had been here beneath the apple trees since her disappearance.
It was impossible to determine the cause of her death. There were no broken bones, no skull fractures, no bullet holes nicking the bones they’d found. Animals had scattered the tiny neck bones that might have indicated strangulation.
Two days after Shawnda was found beneath the airport flight path, another set of remains was found buried nearby. They were not easily identifiable, and the first victim to be known only as “Bones” was added as a possible to the Green River list.
Would he stop killing now that two more victims had been discovered? Would he find that the investigators were getting too close and feel as if he was in imminent danger of being caught? If he was true to serial killer form, the so-called Green River Killer might very well be spooked enough that his grim handiwork was being revealed to move on. It had to be only a matter of time before more of the missing women surfaced. And with every body discovery, the chance that he had unwittingly left something of himself behind, some tiny bit of damning evidence, would grow.
At least, the public was becoming more aware that there was someone truly menacing still roving free. The King County Sheriff’s Office now had three hundred suspects, along with their names, descriptions, and witnesses’ suspicions and accusations. Still, it was problematic whether the GRK was hidden somewhere in that roster of suspects.
I WAS HAVING a small taste of what the detectives were going through as they fielded waves of phone calls and messages. All during 1983, I received phone calls from strangers—at least one or two every night at first, and then about one a week. A lot of people had read my book The Stranger Beside Me, published two years before the Green River cases began. They wanted to compare their feelings with my own because I had known Ted Bundy well—or at least I thought I had. Many were hesitant to call the task force directly, or they were impatient because they hadn’t had an immediate response. All the callers believed that they knew who the Green River Killer was. They didn’t know how many other people felt the same way. I didn’t mind being a conduit for frustrated tipsters, but I knew I was getting only a minuscule number of tips compared to those the sheriff’s detectives were juggling.
In the beginning, I found most of the callers believable. In fact, at the end of most calls, I’ll admit I thought “This has got to be the right man,” only to find the next tip, and the next, even more compelling.
Surprisingly—or perhaps not s
urprisingly—a lot of women were turning in their ex-husbands. Some even suspected the men they were still married to. I had once been a sex crimes detective in the Seattle Police Department for a year and a half. Combining that experience with the fourteen years I wrote about homicide and rape cases for fact-detective magazines, I thought I had heard everything. I was mistaken. My callers had been married to, or were still married to, some of the kinkiest men I’d ever heard of. And most of them lived in the south end of King County.
One woman said her husband invariably returned from sales trips with baggies full of various-colored pubic hair. Another’s husband liked to cut up Playboy centerfolds and then play at rear-ranging the severed limbs and heads. And one ex-husband was apparently writing a book from the first-person viewpoint of a teenage streetwalker. His concerned ex-wife wondered if this was a bad enough sign for her to rethink reconciling with him. I didn’t know, but I told her it certainly would have given me pause.
After hearing dozens of weird stories, I could see that the Green River cases were rapidly becoming the most difficult challenge any law enforcement group could encounter—not because the task force wasn’t getting enough information from the public, but because it was getting too much.
It was fairly easy for me to discern when a tip was from a deranged informant. The woman who believed her son-in-law had killed a hundred people and hidden their bodies in the woods behind his house seemed suspect, especially when the number grew with every minute—and my watch indicated I’d been on the phone with her for more than an hour.