by Ann Rule
Tracy had been on the verge of changing her life that Sunday night when she told her dad not to come down and get her, not to see her in jail. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “you and Mom were so right. I’m going to get myself together, get my GED, go to school. I’m going to make you and Mom so proud of me.”
As September passed, and then October and November, Mertie Winston had an awful feeling. They hadn’t heard a word from Tracy after her call from jail. She had said she was making a new start and they would be proud of her. Maybe she was taking steps in that direction and wanted to surprise them with a fait accompli, or at least with proof that she was on her way. But when Tracy didn’t come home to take her brother Kevin trick or treating or to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family, Mertie knew she had to do something.
“I thought that I would call up the police and report her as a missing person, and then they could check her social security number and tell us where she was working, or where she had been recently. And they took my report. I had to tell them that I just didn’t know where she had lived last. ‘I know my daughter,’ ” Mertie told police. “ ‘She always calls home, but now she hasn’t.’ Even after Tracy was out of the house, she always called at least once a week. When three or four weeks went by and she didn’t call, I knew it was going to be bad. I wouldn’t accept it in my heart, but I knew.”
When the Winstons got a phone call from Randy Mullinax, who was very gentle as he told Chuck that he was one of the detectives working on the Green River Task Force, Mertie heard her husband say “Green River Killer?” and she felt an almost physical jolt. She knew what this call meant—that Tracy might be one of his victims, even though Mullinax assured them that there was nothing definite yet and his was just a follow-up call on the missing person’s report.
Mertie took the phone and described how tall and slender Tracy was, how deep the dimples were on both sides of her mouth when she smiled, and how pretty she was. Mullinax had seen that when he looked at Tracy’s mug shot from King County Jail. He had also seen how scared she looked, a doe caught in the headlights as the jail camera clicked away.
Now that they had to face the worst possibility of all—that the Green River Killer might have gotten hold of Tracy—the Winstons were terrified for her. When her name was added to the Green River list, Mertie was unable to escape the fear and anxiety that grew with each passing day. She could no longer rationalize and tell herself that Tracy was all right, that maybe she had gone to California as her friends tried to tell her.
“I was actually crawling on my bedroom floor, trying to get away from myself, but of course I couldn’t,” Mertie remembers some twenty years later. “I ended up crouched in a corner in a ball. My friend, who loved Tracy as much as I did, begged me to try to sleep. She coaxed me to lie down and rubbed my back, until I finally fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
“I had a dream. I was at Evergreen High School in the gym, and there must have been a dance going on. There was a stage, and the bleachers were pulled out and there were adults sitting on the bleachers. Those round, faceted mirror balls were twirling overhead and casting their lights on the crowd.
“Tracy was there in front of me, with that wonderful smile of hers. I could hear her talking although I couldn’t see her mouth move. She kept smiling at me and I heard her say over and over, ‘I’m okay, Mom. I’m okay now. Don’t worry about me. Everything’s okay.’
“I woke up with a jolt and I didn’t know where I was. I believed—and I still do—that Tracy had been there with me in the room. It was the most peaceful I’ve felt in the last twenty-seven years.” But Mertie sensed that Tracy was never coming home again, that she would never see her again.
The months alternately dragged and flew by. “We talked to anyone and everyone who might know Tracy’s whereabouts, asking who she’d been seeing, where she might have been. Her best friends were twins and had a much wider network than we did. We got reports that she’d been seen in Vancouver, Canada, and California. We passed it all on to the Green River Task Force, no matter how insignificant it seemed to be, whether it was rumor or fact. They treated the information with priority and importance.”
Tracy must have encountered someone who pulled her from her life into oblivion on September 12.
Mertie was more disturbed than reassured when Tracy’s second cousin, Chris, who was nine months older than Tracy, told her about having met Tracy once with an older man. Chris was slim and blond and, like her cousin, a very pretty girl. She remembered the last time she’d seen Tracy and called Mertie and Chuck. It was either in the spring or fall of 1983, probably sometime in September. Chris had been waiting for a bus near the high school she’d once attended when a car drove by and somebody yelled and waved at her. She recognized Tracy, who was riding with a man Chris didn’t know. The driver pulled over and Tracy told Chris to get in and they’d give her a ride to wherever she was going.
Chris got in the backseat. Tracy introduced the man as “Gary” and said that he was a friend of hers who was helping her look for a job. Then Tracy turned to the man and kidded, “Chris and I are the bad seeds in the family.”
“Hi,” the driver said flatly. He was quite a bit older than Tracy, a rather nondescript man. All Chris really remembered about him were his eyes. “He didn’t really look at me when I got in,” she recalled, “but he kept watching me in the rearview mirror. I’ll never ever forget his eyes, and the way he kept watching me. He made me so nervous staring at me that I made up some excuse to get out of his car.”
She couldn’t remember the vehicle the man was driving, but Tracy had seemed to know him, and she certainly didn’t appear to be at all afraid of him.
MAUREEN FEENEY was as Irish as Mary Bridget Meehan, and she looked it. She could have been a nanny or a college student or a novitiate in a nunnery. Although she wasn’t beautiful, she had a nice, open face with pretty blue eyes and she smiled often. She came from a large family, and at nineteen she was emotionally immature and naive, but she yearned for adventure and to be on her own. Maureen was thrilled to find a little mother-in-law apartment she could afford in January 1983. She moved to Eastgate, a neighborhood just south of the I-90 Freeway near Bellevue, and she worked for the Eastside Christian School, a benign place for a girl whose family was concerned about her.
Maureen had never dated in high school, and she still didn’t have a boyfriend. Her best friend recalled that she talked to Maureen almost every day on the phone, and she’d been surprised that her shy friend was going out to clubs and had started drinking. That wasn’t like Maureen, and she wasn’t handling alcohol very well. Sometimes her words slurred a little on the phone.
Like so many teenagers, Maureen’s self-image in high school had been very low; although she wasn’t anorexic, she had occasionally cut herself with razor blades—thin, shallow slices—on her upper arms where it wouldn’t show. She once told her best friend that she’d sat in her family’s garage with the car motor running. Her mother had found her before anything bad happened.
Maureen loved her first tiny apartment, but she had to move out when the landlord told her a relative wanted to move in. She found another place in Seattle’s Central District at 15th and E. Madison, an area with a much higher crime rate than Eastgate. She told her mother she had chosen her new neighborhood because she wanted to work with underprivileged children. She did get a job at a day-care facility and worked there in the late summer/early fall of 1983. Her friend Kathy visited her almost every day. Toward the end of August, Maureen told Kathy that she had a boyfriend, and she seemed excited about that. She’d met him at a bus stop near her apartment. She noted their meeting in her date book: “August 23—I met Eddie J.* today!”
Kathy was anxious to meet Eddie J. She knew he was of a different race from Maureen, but that didn’t matter as long as he was nice to her friend. But he was never there when Kathy came to Maureen’s apartment. There was always some excuse why he had to be out and about.
Although Maureen
usually spent her weekends at her family’s house or at their vacation home, they still felt uneasy about her living in the Central District. Her brother Brian sent her a check for quite a bit of money so she could afford to move back home, but she evidently didn’t want to. She told Kathy that she and Eddie J. were going to go to California.
“How are you going to afford that?” Kathy asked.
“Oh, Eddie J. has lots of ways to make money,” Maureen answered. “We’ll be fine.”
But she never got to California—at least as far as detectives could determine. Exactly one week before Maureen’s twentieth birthday, she left her apartment forever. It was September 28, 1983. Three years later, Eddie J., a reluctant witness, told task force detective Kevin O’Keefe, who was on loan from the Seattle Police Department, that Maureen left sometime between five and six PM that day. “She told me she was going to the Seven-Eleven. I fell asleep after she left and I didn’t wake up until about eleven that night. She never came back.”
Eddie J. thought she might have gone looking for a job. He had found a newspaper with an ad circled on Maureen’s dresser. It read “Exotic Dancers Wanted: ‘Sugar’s.’ ” The name “Bob” was written in the margin beside the ad.
The thought of sweet Maureen Feeney performing as an exotic dancer seemed ridiculous to her best friend and her family. Eddie J. claimed to be completely baffled about where she might be and said he had no idea about her activities outside of her day-care job.
Her employer, however, said that she had seen “a notable personality change” over the two months before she vanished. Only a few days before September 28, Maureen had come to her and said she wouldn’t be needing a job for very long because she was “coming into money.”
She told her mother that she planned to quit her day-care job because she couldn’t get enough time off when she needed it. Another resident in the apartment house where Maureen lived told O’Keefe that he had heard her having an argument with Eddie J. in the hallway the night she disappeared.
Maureen’s brother Brian and her brother-in-law searched for her for a long time, putting up posters with her picture anywhere they thought people might recognize her, asking for someone, anyone, who might have a clue to where she was to come forward.
But it seemed if she had walked into the twilight and been swallowed up by the night.
19
PERHAPS the most frightening thing about the Green River murders was the bleak interweaving of the disappearances and the discoveries of bodies. How the puppeteer must be enjoying his string-pulling. One thing the task force detectives were sure of—was that he was out there someplace, watching. If he didn’t actually live in the south end of King County, Washington, he was most certainly flying or driving in and out to kill again and again. He must be having a ball watching television and reading newspapers.
Whether he was the person who sent helpful advice to the Green River investigators may never be proven absolutely. But a “helpful” directive came into their headquarters. It was written in shaky handwriting, and was rife with spelling mistakes. The writer, anonymous, titled his work: “Going About Catching the GRK.”
He explained that he was the GRK, and that he had been doing many things to throw the detectives’ investigation off track. For instance, he bragged about dating between twenty and forty “prostetutes [sic] whom he hadn’t killed. I needed them out there alive in case I got caught—to say I didn’t hurt them.
“All custumers dont want photos taken of them with prostetutes All police cars should cary a small camera (instamatic) Take pictures of custumers with ladys. Out of car & in. If the lady died he would be the last one seen with her.”
The writer admonished the police to have better relations with the women on the street, and to ask them about their customers.
They were already doing that.
“All crime sites take vedio of people watching (That wouldn’t have cought me though).”
It was September 1983 now. And there had been three more disappearances in one month. It had been fourteen months since the first body was discovered in the Green River.
TEN MILES SOUTH of the Strip, a winding road leads down toward the once-verdant Green River Valley from Pac HiWay at about S. 272nd Street. Close to the bottom of the hill is a narrow road: Star Lake Road. In the mid-1980s, both sides of the road were thickly wooded, even though new homes and an elementary school were only a few blocks away. On the downhill side of the road, twenty-five or so feet beyond the shoulder, a deep gorge dropped away, ending in a narrow creek.
On September 18, 1983, what would become known as the “Star Lake Road site” began to be unveiled. Although it seemed impossible—and still does—a passerby found skeletonized remains near a tree just where the bank started its plunge downward. It was so close to the road, how could it be that no one had smelled the unforgettably horrible stench of a human corpse, unburied, disintegrating? How could a body have lain there undiscovered for so long? Was it possible that someone had carried the bones there after the person had died?
More likely, the body had “self-buried.” Many so-called shallow graves are not graves at all, but the natural result of the coming and going of seasons. Along Star Lake Road, as this body had decomposed, it literally returned to earth, sinking into the damp browning maple leaves beneath it. Wind storms brought more leaves down on top of it. With rain, snow, and wind, it would sink deeper with every season.
On the shoulder of Star Lake Road some fifteen feet from the body, which would not be identified for a long time, someone had dumped a load of garbage with a battered pair of work boots on top of it. But in the springtime, there would be silent benedictions there, too, a half-dozen white trilliums, a wildflower so rare that it is illegal to pick it in some areas, sprouted from the leaf carpet.
YVONNE SHELLY ANTOSH, who had come to Seattle from British Columbia, had been staying at a motel on the Strip with a girl she’d known since they were both children. In the almost five months since she disappeared on the highway, she hadn’t gotten in touch with her friend or with anyone else who knew her.
She couldn’t have, because Yvonne’s body had been left far away at S. 316th and the Auburn/Black Diamond Road. Long since skeletonized, her remains were discovered on October 15, 1983.
Connie Naon, whose car was found abandoned in the Red Lion parking lot, was dead, too. Gone on June 8, 1983, from S. 188th and the highway, Connie was found on October 27 very close by—at S. 191st and 25th Avenue South, almost directly under the flight path of planes taking off to the south. She had been left in the weeds near some big-leafed maple trees on empty land behind Alaska Airlines’ headquarters and the Sandstone Motel and Restaurant.
Two days later, in the same area, detectives located the remains of Kelly Ware. She had last been seen alive downtown on Madison Street on July 18, and she was found on October 29 at S. 190th and 24th Avenue South.
20
WHILE KELLY, Connie, and Yvonne were being found, more young women were disappearing.
Mary Sue Bello, twenty-five, was older than most of the missing girls and considered herself streetwise. She vanished on October 11, five weeks before her birthday. Almost everyone she met liked Mary, and her family treasured her, but she had taken chaotic chances with her life from the moment she entered puberty. Her mother, Suzanne, had cried millions of tears over Mary, and begged her to choose a different lifestyle.
But Mary had only laughed. Nothing was going to happen to her. She was too savvy to be conned by someone like the Green River Killer.
ANY EFFORT to understand Mary Sue has to begin years before her birth, because few of us come into this world without either suffering or benefiting from what has gone on before.
Despite years of searching, Mary’s mother, Suzanne Draper Villamin, had been able to glean only a few facts about her own life. Until she was ten, she believed that the parents she lived with in a comfortable home in Seattle’s Magnolia area were hers by birth. She was born in 1942, i
n an era when adoptive parents often chose not to tell children about the real circumstances of their birth. The Drapers decided to let Suzanne believe she was theirs. But she was in for a terrible shock.
“I was in the fifth grade—in Mrs. Graves’s class,” she remembered. “One of the kids in my class overheard my mother telling Mrs. Graves that I wasn’t really hers, that I was adopted. My classmate couldn’t wait to tell me, and it had a awful effect on me. I went home and told my mother what I’d heard and asked her if it was true. She had a terrible fit, but she would only admit that I was adopted. She wouldn’t tell me where I’d come from, and she discouraged my trying to find out.”
All Suzanne knew was that her birthday was April 9, 1942, and that she’d been born in Seattle. Later, she found out that her birth name was Beverly K. Gillam or Gilliam. When she was a little older, she found out more. Her parents had been married, and she was her mother’s fourth child and possibly her father’s, too. She wasn’t sure. She’d had twin sisters five years older than she. They had blond hair and blue eyes.
“There was a boy, too,” Sue said. “My mother drank heavily—I learned that. One time, she left the three older kids alone while she went out. There was a fire and they were able to save my twin sisters, but my brother died. And my parents broke up because of that.”
At some point in 1942, Sue’s mother headed for Alaska, but she left Sue, only a few months old, alone in a rooming house. It was three days before anyone discovered her and called the police.
“I was taken to the Medina Children’s Home,” she said. “And the Drapers adopted me when I was six months old, and since I wasn’t old enough to remember anything, they just let me grow up believing I’d been born to them.”
Her adoptive father was a strong, handsome man who was a foreman in a warehouse for a company located in Magnolia, one of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods, and the woman she would always call “mother” was a housewife. Her life with them was comfortable and happy. She grew up an only child, doted on by her parents and her maternal grandmother. But, from the time she was ten, she’d always wondered about her birth family.