by Ann Rule
Psychics with “visions” called, but their information was never precise enough to be of any help. Barbara Kubik-Patten called me a lot, complaining that the task force detectives were not giving her the attention she deserved.
Still, many of my callers were quite rational people who were worried sick that someone they knew was the Green River Killer. I typed up the information that seemed to make an awful kind of sense and passed it on. Eventually, the task force detectives gave me a stack of their official tip sheets so I could streamline the process of sending them information on possible suspects. I didn’t expect to hear back from them; they were too busy to report to me, or to anyone beyond the relatives of the missing girls.
18
HE DIDN’T STOP KILLING.
The fact that more bodies had been discovered seemed only to have added another dimension to the Green River Killer’s game. He waited exactly one week after Shawnda Summers was found before he went out prowling again.
APRIL DAWN BUTTRAM had just moved to Seattle from Spokane. She was almost eighteen, a pretty girl with blond hair and rosy cheeks, who would have looked in her element at a country church supper or a square dance. She was just a little over five feet tall, and she had sometimes weighed as much as 175, but she had slimmed down quite a bit. Hers was an all too familiar story. Overnight, April had changed from an obedient child to a teenager who quit school, tried drugs and alcohol, and wanted to party all the time.
She was eager to leave Spokane for the much more cosmopolitan city of Seattle, and she wouldn’t listen to her mother’s arguments against it. April was confident she could make it. When she reached her eighteenth birthday, she could collect a $10,000 trust fund a relative had set up for her. But in the middle of the summer of 1983, April planned to catch a ride to Seattle with two girlfriends, one of whom had permission to drive her mother’s car on the trip. None of them had any notion of what dangers might be out there, or much common sense.
“One night,” April’s mother recalled, “I caught her crawling out of the window, carrying a suitcase. I gave up. I just told her, ‘At least have the guts to go out the front door.’ And she did. And she never came back.”
The trio of Spokane girls had picked up three male hitchhikers on their way to Seattle, but they were lucky so far. The men didn’t harm them—they were just grateful for the ride. A few days after they got to Seattle, April and her girlfriends split up.
The last accurate sighting of April Buttram was in the Rainier Valley in southeast Seattle around the middle of August 1983. She was still seventeen, but she was definitely planning to travel back to Spokane, three hundred miles away, to withdraw her trust fund money. She didn’t make it. The money remained, untouched.
April was officially reported missing on March 24, 1984, after months of denial on her family’s part. Her mother feared that she would get a phone call one day telling her that someone had found April’s body, but there was only silence.
DEBORA MAY ABERNATHY was twenty-six, and she had come to Seattle along a circuitous route from Waco, Texas. She was a frail little woman who stood five feet tall and weighed only ninety pounds. She had very attractive features, but she sometimes put on horn-rimmed glasses and instantly looked like an old-time, stereotypical librarian, very prim and studious. She, her boyfriend, and her three-year-old son came to Seattle in late July of 1983 looking for a fresh start.
They were soon out of funds. A kindhearted couple met the down-and-out family in a store and invited them to stay in a room in their house until they could “get on their feet.” Debora, wearing a burgundy jumpsuit, was headed toward downtown Seattle on September 5 the last time her little boy and boyfriend saw her.
TRACY ANN WINSTON was going to be twenty on September 29, 1983. Of all the young women one might expect to find in jail, Tracy seemed the least likely. She and her parents and two younger brothers all loved each other a lot. Any one of them would do anything to protect her. But Tracy had had her problems, too, almost from the moment she turned thirteen and plunged into puberty. It is, of course, an age when parents often wonder what has happened to their sweet daughters, and when daughters find their parents boring, old-fashioned, and uncaring. Tracy disappeared on September 12.
The investigators thought they had detected a pattern. If the Green River Killer was responsible for these recent disappearances, he seemed to be taking victims a week apart at this point, almost exclusively on weeknights. Did the days of the week mean something important, or was it mere coincidence? But Tracy’s vanishing broke the pattern. Counting back, they saw that she was last seen on a Sunday night/Monday morning between eleven PM and one AM. She had been in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle on a loitering charge.
Tracy bailed out of jail, and she was walking along Cherry Street, near the jail, when she was last seen by a cabdriver she knew who pulled up beside her. (It was not Melvyn Foster.) She needed a ride to the place where she was staying out in the north end of Seattle, but he told her he had a fare in the other direction out to the airport. Later, the driver told Green River investigators about their conversation.
“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes,” he’d promised Tracy. “Stay here and I’ll see that you get where you need to go safely.”
Tracy had called her father, Chuck Winston, from jail that night; she had been mortified at being locked up for the first and only time of her life. The experience had shocked her so much that she vowed she would never, ever do anything that might put her there again. She begged her father and her mother, Mertie, not to come down, saying, “I don’t want you to see me in here, not like this. Please don’t come down here.”
And they had honored her wishes, fighting the urge to get in their car and hurry down to 9th and Cherry.
Mertie and Chuck Winston had been just about Tracy’s age when she was born. “I was an older woman though,” Mertie remembered. “In those days, a female was considered of age when she was eighteen, but a male had to be twenty-one, and I was a couple of months older than Chuck. His mother always looked upon me as a ‘scarlet woman’ who seduced her son.”
Tracy was born in Tacoma, Washington, where her mother had been born. Mertie was working at the phone company and Chuck was getting ready to go into the air force, so Mertie lived with her maternal grandmother at the time of Tracy’s birth. Their circumstances were such that Mertie couldn’t take care of Tracy and work, too, but she fell in love with the baby who had deep dimples just like Chuck’s. A Catholic Charities caseworker tried to help Mertie decide what would be best for Tracy.
At the time, it seemed that placing the baby in a foster home was the best plan. But Mertie’s heart ached from missing her baby. She spent every extra penny she had to buy booties, blankets, and little dresses for Tracy and her caseworker saw to it that they were given to Tracy’s temporary foster mother. “I found out later that the woman had a baby girl herself, and she was giving Tracy’s things to her baby,” Mertie recalled. “Finally, I couldn’t stand it. Tracy was meant to be with me all the time, so I went and got her, and I was so happy.”
Chuck Winston, whose talent and interests lay in military communications, was sent to an air base in Savannah, Georgia, and Mertie and Tracy went with him. They found a tiny apartment that had been carved out of an older home. Their landlady was very nice but the steamy, oppressive heat of Savannah was suffocating to anyone who had been raised in the Pacific Northwest. The worst, however, were the cockroaches.
“I’d never even seen one,” Mertie said. “Our apartment had a huge kitchen—compared to the rest of the place—with a big old stove. It was pushed so close to the wall that I was afraid the electric cord might be wearing through, so I pushed and pulled it out into the room a little bit. Well! There was a large hole in the wall, and these cockroaches came flooding out all over the walls and floor. Tracy thought it was funny, but I freaked and was fending them off with a Downy fabric softener bottle. I grabbed Tracy and we went to a park until Chuck got home. I
was holding Tracy and sobbing and I told Chuck, ‘I have to go home!’ He got very quiet and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get you a bus ticket and send you back home.’
“That woke me up,” Mertie said with a smile, “and I told him, ‘No. I can take it.’ We were there only six months. Chuck was slated to go to Vietnam…to be dropped into the backcountry ahead of troops and set up communications lines. Those men had a very high mortality rate, and the air force noted Chuck had a wife and a child, and they transferred him to Sacramento, California, instead. That’s where our son Chip was born when Tracy was three and a half.”
Chuck Winston considered a service career, and Mertie said she would go along with whatever he decided. But, in the end, he returned to the Boeing Airplane Company and they came home to Seattle. Their luck was teetering on the edge. By 1967, Boeing stock dropped and “They turned the lights off in Seattle.” Chuck was laid off shortly thereafter, but he found a communications job with a Fresno company. Kevin, the youngest of their children was born in Fresno.
They were a typical family of the sixties and seventies, with a little house in Fresno that had a “swamp cooler” instead of air-conditioning and a blow-up wading pool in the backyard. “We used to drive up to see the sequoias with the kids to cool off,” Mertie remembered. “The air smelled so clean up there, and it felt like home, but you could see the layers of heat coming up from the valley floor as we drove back to Fresno, and the kids would be cranky and tired by the time we got home.”
Illness in their extended families led them to return to the Seattle area, and they settled in Burien, a few miles from the SeaTac Airport. Tracy had grown to be a tall, slender girl who had a special bond with her dad. Chuck taught her how to play baseball and she was one of only two girls allowed to join the boys’ Little League team in District 7. “She could throw from center field to home plate without bouncing it once,” her dad said proudly. At five feet nine, 150 pounds, Tracy played forward on the Glacier High School first-string girls’ basketball team.
As close as Tracy was to her dad, she was a typical teenager with her mother, always taking the opposite stance from whatever Mertie suggested.
“It got so bad,” Mertie Winston said with a wry smile, “that I couldn’t even take her shopping. My mom would take her, and when Tracy brought home her clothes, I had to pretend to dislike the things I did like. Tracy would say, ‘Do you like this?’ and I’d kind of drag out my answer, ‘…Yeah…’ And so she’d say, ‘You don’t like it. You hate it, but I’m going to wear it!’ ”
It was teenage stuff, and almost any mother would recognize it. “Tracy used to tell me, ‘You’re more concerned about what I wear than about who I am!’ ” Mertie said. “And all I could do was shake my head and say, ‘You’re changing so fast, I don’t know who you are….’ ”
Things were still fairly normal for a family with a teenager. Mertie and Chuck went to all of Tracy’s games and school activities. When there were concerts or other events that Tracy and her friends wanted to attend, a group of mothers arranged to drive them there and pick them up.
When Tracy was thirteen she became friends with a sixteen-year-old girl who was planning to run away. The girl coaxed Tracy, insisting that they should run away together—along with the other girl’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend. Tracy was intrigued by the idea. The other girl’s father called Chuck Winston and said, “We’ve got a problem.”
And they did. Tracy always believed that she could help her friends with their problems. When the sixteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend actually made it to California, they called Tracy and urged her to steal money from her parents, take a bus, and meet them.
Reasoning with Tracy didn’t do any good. “I told her that she was too young to deal with their problems, that she couldn’t even handle her own problems yet,” her mother said.
Chuck attempted to talk with Tracy and, thinking he would help her understand her mother, he told Tracy about how hard it was for Mertie when Tracy was just a baby, how she’d had to fight to get her back from Catholic Charities.
“It backfired,” Mertie said. “She was shocked. Now, everything I did was not only wrong, it was wrong in triplicate. She said I didn’t love her. I tried to explain that I was trying to protect her because I wanted her to be safe, not because I didn’t love her. But she kept demanding that I prove I really loved her by letting her do what she wanted.”
In vain, Mertie warned Tracy that she could not always judge others by how they looked or what they said, that she could not automatically trust people. “You can’t just trust blindly.”
“Mom,” Tracy retorted, “I’m amazed that you have any friends at all.”
One spring afternoon, as Tracy was trying to determine her own self-worth, she demanded that her mother prove to her that she was more important to Mertie than anyone else. They sat on the Winstons’ front porch as Tracy spelled out what she needed in order to feel good about herself.
“I want you to love me more than you love Chip…or Kevin.”
“Oh, Tracy,” Mertie said, “I love you all differently. What do you want from me that you think I’m not giving you?”
“I want you to leave Dad and Chip and Kevin and just go away with me and we’ll live by ourselves,” Tracy said.
When Tracy Winston was little and could not yet count, she had told her mother, “I love you nine, and ten, and twenty-one!”—her little girl’s idea of the most anyone could love somebody else. But now she was sixteen, and Mertie tried to explain what it was like, back in the days before Tracy could remember, how much she had always loved her oldest child, her only daughter, and how she had fought to keep her when she herself was not much older than Tracy. Most of all, Mertie told her that she did, indeed, love her “nine and ten and twenty-one!”
And Tracy, who rushed to trust everyone else, could not bring herself to trust her mother’s love, even though it was her mother who stayed up late to pick her up from her job at a Dairy Queen in a borderline neighborhood. “I couldn’t let two young kids close up the place all by themselves.” Mertie sighed. “But she saw that as my controlling her—not that I was there because I loved her.”
Tracy met a man who was nineteen, older than she was, a smooth and glib sociopath who was already on his way to prison. Her mother detested him, so, of course, Tracy adored him. Even his own sister warned Mertie and Chuck that they had to keep Tracy away from him if they could. “He’s a con man,” she said. “He’s slick and he’ll change her so you won’t even recognize her.”
His sister was right. Tracy fell totally in love with the man who had decided to groom her to be absolutely dedicated to what he wanted. “She would do anything he asked,” her mother recalled. “And she was gone all the time—anywhere but home because we wouldn’t let him call her. We tried tough love…and she left so she could see him. She thought he was a nice guy, and that we weren’t giving him a chance.
“He controlled her,” Mertie recalled, “and even when he was in prison at the Monroe Reformatory, he wrote her terrible letters: sexual letters, demanding letters, guilt-producing letters. They were clearly designed to appeal to her sense of fair play and concern for other people, and prove to her that he couldn’t live without her. He said he loved her more than anyone else, and that she had to prove her love for him. Chuck wrote to the warden and asked him to stop this guy from writing to a teenage girl, and the warden said he couldn’t do that; it would take away the prisoner’s rights. And we weren’t supposed to open his letters or throw them away because that was against the law.”
When Tracy’s lover was paroled from prison, her parents were beside themselves. “He called here once,” Mertie said, “and I let him have it, using language I never use. I told him to stay away from Tracy. He never called again, but I think Tracy was seeing him. We got no help from anyone, and we didn’t know what to do. I found out that Chuck was going out at night, looking for Tracy. He took an aluminum baseball bat with him because he had to go to really ba
d places. When the police said they couldn’t do anything, Chuck finally walked into the Georgetown Precinct carrying his bat. He told them he was going to use it if he had to, and they said they’d have to arrest him if he did.”
“So follow me then,” Tracy’s dad said.
Two uniformed officers did follow him as he went to a house where he thought the occupants were hiding Tracy. He banged on the door and demanded that they send Tracy out, but they said she wasn’t there. Chuck Winston and the two cops looked through the house and found that indeed Tracy wasn’t there, but she had been.
Tracy’s parents seldom knew any longer where she was staying. She still came to see them—for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She wouldn’t tell them where she was living, but she would come home for dinner.
“We always sent her away with care packages,” Mertie said. “Mostly canned food, macaroni and cheese. For a while, she lived with a gay man who was a chef, and that seemed a little safer to us. Chuck would drive her home, but when he went back to see her, he’d find out that wasn’t really where she lived.”
The last time Mertie saw Tracy was on Mother’s Day, 1983, and it was a good visit. They gave each other a big hug and Mertie said, “I love you!” and Tracy said, “I love you, too!”
Her parents had come to a place where they realized they couldn’t follow Tracy everywhere. She was almost twenty now, and they had two other children to raise in a time when the job market was iffy. Mertie was working on commissions only, and her hours weren’t predictable.
“I don’t know if she was ever prostituting,” Mertie said. “I can’t imagine that it was a regular thing for her. I know she wasn’t at all hardened. I talked to one of the jailers on that last weekend when Tracy was in there, and she told me, ‘She has no business being here; she’s like a frightened rabbit.’ ”