by Ann Rule
Missy’s houseparents at the school did their best for the thin, little girl who seemed to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had lost her birth mother, her half sister, and her twin brother. Although she was unaware of it, her mother and father had married and remarried other partners. She had another half sister, her birth father’s daughter by a different woman, but she didn’t know that. In a sense, being at the school, Missy had also lost a real home with her adoptive parents who had tried valiantly but just couldn’t cope with her hyperactivity and mood swings.
Missy did go home on weekends, and she was medicated for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) only on those Saturdays and Sundays when she desperately needed it all the time. But Sister Antonia did not believe that hyperactive children should be treated with pharmacological solutions such as Ritalin, particularly not when they were in school, and so when Missy came back on Sunday night or Monday morning, she literally went through chemical withdrawal, week after week.
One time she came back from a home visit and her housemother found that Missy’s buttocks were slightly bruised. It wasn’t difficult to leave marks on Missy—her fair skin was thin and delicate. She sobbed as Sister Antonia took photos of the bruises. She wasn’t crying because of the pain but because she was afraid she was going to get someone in her family or their friends in trouble.
Missy was pubescent and had begun to develop tiny breasts. She whispered to her housemother, Barbara, at the dinner table that some older boys she encountered had pinched her and teased her about them. “All I could do was tell her that I was sorry,” Barbara recalled, “and that I knew that must have hurt her feelings, and that they shouldn’t have done that to her.”
It may not, however, have been all one-sided. Because she had been so robbed of nurturing up until the age of five, Missy craved physical contact. For most of her life, she was unable to say “no” to boys and men who hugged her and kissed her. She had missed out completely on the normal cuddling all babies need.
One of the saddest nights the housemother could remember was when the school put on a little show. “I don’t think Missy had any hope that her family was going to come, but her adoptive mother did come. Missy was so glad to see her that she was overwhelmed and she started to cry immediately. Poor Missy kept sobbing all through the performance. Later, she was so proud to introduce her mother to the staff. It was obvious that she loved her mother, who was trying hard to deal with the problems that had begun in Missy’s earliest years.”
Despite everything Missy had been through in her short life, she still cared deeply and loved deeply. She was not a hardened little soul unable to bond or form attachments. A volunteer at the school, Thelma “Woody” Johnson, worked one-on-one with Missy, calmly helping her to slow down and speak more quietly.
“Woody was wonderful with Missy,” the little girl’s housemother recalled. “My husband always remembers her as a child with ‘sparkle.’ There was still so much hope and promise there.”
As the months passed, Missy’s emotional problems became more evident, and it was decided that she should be moved to a residential facility where she would be allowed fewer home visits. It was agonizing for Barbara and her husband to see Missy pack up to go and not be able to stop the transfer. She thought that Missy, of all people, needed a place where she felt she had some roots. “After she left, I was allowed to talk to Missy once on the phone,” Barbara said. “I told her I missed her—and I did.”
Years went by without any word from Missy, and then Barbara learned that she had been placed in Echo Glen, a facility near North Bend, Washington, for teenagers who had been in trouble with the law or who needed to be locked away from the world. “We could only imagine what had brought her to that point,” Barbara remembered.
A lot had happened to Missy, and not much of it was good. Besides being hyperactive, she had a learning disorder that made school very difficult for her. She had been in Echo Glen for treatment, and she had also spent some time in the Maple Lane School for Girls. All through her teen years, she kept the dream alive that one day she would find her real mother and father and her brother, and that they would reunite and be a happy family.
Missy grew tougher, at least on the surface, but those who knew her recognized her vulnerability. She had a lot of “substitute” sisters and mothers who gave her somewhere to stay and tried to imbue her with a sense of self-worth. But she was a challenging guest or tenant. A terrible housekeeper, she didn’t clean at all unless she had to find something she needed under a pile of clothes or dirty dishes.
There were too many times when it seemed Missy was fated to die young. She was in a devastating car crash in 1977. Her hip and jaw were broken, and her skull fractured. She had to have a tracheotomy to breathe, but, once again, she survived.
Out of school and more or less on her own, Missy got several tattoos, marks that might have made her identifiable if anything fatal happened to her. She had “Love” on the back of one hand, “Frank” inside one of her arms, a good luck symbol on one of her fingers, and a butterfly on her knee. They were amateur tattoos, either etched there by a friend or by herself. But she had a commercially created tattoo on her right shoulder, a dragon.
Looking for someone she could love, Missy had two children out of wedlock—a little girl, Nicole, in 1976 or 1977, and a boy, Darrell, in 1979. She was not seriously involved with either of the men who fathered her babies, but she loved her children. Even so, she was not emotionally equipped to take care of them. She’d missed out on those desperately important first five years when little girls learn how to be mothers by emulating their own mothers.
Sometimes the children were with her, but, more often, the friends she had cultivated as family took care of Nicole and Darrell. Missy was, after all, only sixteen when she gave birth to her older child, and eighteen when she had Darrell.
If her life had been a television movie, there would have been a happy ending for Missy in 1982. A girl she met on Seattle’s Capitol Hill stared at her and remarked, “You know, you look enough like my boyfriend to be his twin!”
And she was. Missy had found the twin brother she’d lost seventeen years before. He lived in Tacoma and he knew where their father was. His name was Dennis and he was living in Texas. Missy called her father, and he put her in touch with her mother, who had remarried several times and now lived in Reno, Nevada.
When Missy called Patricia, her mother invited her to come down for Christmas. Both of them had high expectations of a sentimental reunion. Instead, it was a disaster. Patricia, who had not taken care of Missy and her twin brother, was raising her boyfriend/husband’s children. Her alcoholism had progressed, and she really wasn’t ready to take on the daughter who’d been out of her life for so many years and now had two children of her own.
As Missy tried to tell her mother about how tough her life had been and how she had missed having her own family, Patricia felt both guilty and repelled. Missy’s being in group homes and girls’ training schools bothered her. She had somehow expected a grown-up daughter who had turned out well.
Patricia, who worked for a film-processing company in a kiosk in a strip mall, didn’t have the funds to help Missy move close to her and her current male companion. Besides, Missy was her usual self as a house guest and left everything a mess. Patricia was close to her older daughter; Missy was more of a burden. And after too many drinks, Patricia said a terrible thing. “You’ve got so many problems,” she told Missy, “maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t resuscitated you when you were born.”
It was like a knife in Missy’s heart. She had spent her whole life counting on her dream, and now she realized that her mother didn’t even care if she was alive or dead. Worse, her mother seemed to wish she had never lived.
Missy called her father and told him that things hadn’t gone well in Reno. She was going back to the Seattle-Tacoma area. Her mother had bought her a one-way ticket as a Christmas present. “When she left,
” her mother recalled later, “I gave her a turquoise- and-silver ring. It wasn’t expensive, but she told me she’d never take it off.”
It was almost 1983, and after that, Missy just seemed to drift. She missed appointments with social workers and counselors to talk about her children and what would be best for them. She lived here and there. Her half sister (her father’s daughter by another woman) found Missy and told her she’d been searching for her for twenty years. She had traced their father’s genealogy and found Missy. Joanie* came up to Washington State and they tried living together for about two weeks, but it was too late to establish a sister/sister relationship. Joanie’s life had been better than Missy’s and she had a solid career and different values.
Around that time, Missy tried suicide, leaving long vertical scars on her wrists. Some of her friends found her in time, but she didn’t believe in anything anymore. By 1983, she hated men. It seemed as though every man she’d ever known had either ignored her or mis-treated her. Her twin was down in Texas with their father—both of them on parole after serving time for some kind of scam—working in a restaurant together. There was a good chance her daughter was going to be adopted, and her son was living with her friend Maia, who was the closest thing to a mother Missy had, but she was scared to death that the Washington Department of Social and Health Services was going to take Darrell away from her, too.
In early 1983, Missy lived for a few weeks or a month at a time with men she thought were friends—they weren’t. She confided in Maia that she realized one older man was trying to groom her to be a prostitute by getting her hooked on drugs, so she left him.
But Missy did get hooked on drugs. She bought some at a building that was once a church but was anything but that in the summer of 1983. It had become a teenage “rave” club called The Monastery. The Seattle Police Department and the King County Prosecutor’s Office were investigating the seamy dark club and would close it down within two years, but it was an easy place for underage kids to score drugs in 1983. Missy was in the process that summer of getting a grotesque tattoo—a werewolf that extended from just beneath her chin to her lower abdomen. It wasn’t filled in yet; just the ugly outline was traced.
Finally, she gave in to the pressure to work the streets. In April 1983, she’d been living in a tiny basement apartment, where she could just about afford the cheap rent. A few months later, she called a female attorney who had helped her before. “She was strung out on drugs and terrified that she would lose her kids,” the woman recalled. “I hadn’t talked to her for a while and I don’t know what happened…she’d been enthusiastic about going back to school to get her GED, but now she was going downhill fast. She had always been looking for approval, and failing in most categories. I know she lied to her mother when she left Reno, telling her that she had a boyfriend waiting for her to come home. But she didn’t. She had no one.”
Missy’s intimate friends knew that she would not allow johns to have actual intercourse with her. She would perform only oral sex, telling those women closest to her, “Anything else would be a violation of my inner body.” “She would do car dates or go to motels,” a friend who was like a sister said. “She would never go to a john’s house.”
And still, Missy hoped to get enough money and a good enough apartment to bring her children home. In the early fall of 1983, she was attending parenting classes, praying that she would need them.
But she was a paradox. Only weeks later, Missy and the friend who was like a sister, who had also turned to prostitution, traveled to Olympia, Washington, to earn “big money” by participating in a threesome. The john didn’t pay them, laughing at them instead. From there, on a whim, they either took a bus or hitchhiked to Virginia or North Carolina where the other girl had relatives. There, they had a disagreement and split up.
Somehow Missy scraped up the money to get back to Seattle. She made it home and moved in with another friend, only to disappear at Halloween. Maia reported her missing when she never showed up to go to the storage unit to pick up the Halloween costume. She described Missy’s petite figure, her blond hair, her tattoos, the little turquoise ring, the “trache” scar, and the gap she had between her upper middle front teeth. “Her teeth are pretty nice, but she does have that space there.”
Just before Christmas, 1983, Missy’s father, Dennis, received a strange phone call at his home in Texas. It was a woman who cried, “Dad! I’ll be home for Christmas!” And then the line went dead. He could not say whose voice it was.
Barbara, Missy’s long-ago housemother, recalled hearing that Missy was believed to be a victim of the Green River Killer. “Then, of course, came the horrifying day when we heard her name on the news, and saw her sad face in a picture in the newspaper,” Barbara said. “She did not deserve that fate. She was a sweet child who had so much working against her. And the sadness continued when we read that she was a mother herself and that her children had been taken from her. We never learned any of the details, but it was not surprising that the cycle would be repeating itself, as is so often the case. It is important that someone, somewhere, be on record that she was a child who really cared, that she mattered, and that she had suffered so much heartache and loss in her short life. And she didn’t deserve to die such a horrific death.”
NONE OF THEM DID.
Pammy Avent, Patricia Osborn, and Missy Plager were all slender and small-boned. Kim Nelson, twenty, also known as Tina Lee Tomson, was almost six feet tall, and a strong young woman. She had a sullen sexiness, short yellow-blond hair, and D-cup breasts that made her especially attractive to the men who drove along streets and highways looking for “dates.” For some reason, it was always the tall police officer decoys who attracted the most johns along the Strip. Maybe it was because the tall girls were unusual and stood out from the average.
BORN in Michigan, Tina grew up as Kimberly Nelson. She had dropped out of Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School in the eleventh grade and somehow made her way to Seattle, with many stops along the way. Back home, she had her mother, Greta; her stepfather, Ed Turner; and sisters who worried about her. Her father, Howard Nelson, lived in Florida. But Tina had stretched the cord leading home too far to go back. She’d phoned her sister to say she wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas 1983, because she couldn’t afford the trip. Her mother sent her money, but Kim never showed up.
By the time Tina was living in the Northwest, she was the sole support of a pimp, a man who was distraught when she was sentenced to the King County Jail for prostitution in early October 1983. He had whined that he didn’t know how he would survive without the money she provided by turning tricks. She was three or four months pregnant, but that didn’t matter to him. Her pregnancy may have been the reason why she didn’t go home to Ann Arbor for Christmas, but more likely, she couldn’t go home ever again.
After the holidays, Kim’s boyfriend called her family to ask if she was with them. They told him they hadn’t talked to her since long before Christmas.
Kim/Tina had so many street names that sometimes even she had trouble remembering “who” she was at any given moment. She and her girlfriend Paige Miley didn’t know each other all that well. Paige knew Tina as “Star,” and that was all. Their pimps were friends, and they moved the young women who kept them from having to find honest jobs from place to place, wherever the men felt there was the most money to be made.
When Kim/Tina/Star got out of jail just before Halloween, she and Paige were driven from Aurora Avenue in north Seattle to the SeaTac Strip, and they moved into the Ben Carol Motel. They worked two nights at the Evergreen Truck Stop in Federal Way, but Paige got arrested by Scott Wales, an undercover King County detective, warned, and released.
Afterward, Paige was never absolutely positive of the date when she last saw Tina. It was either the day of Halloween or November 1. She did remember it was raining hard at eleven in the morning, and it was cold out. Detectives Randy Mullinax and Matt Haney’s records showed that Paige had reported T
ina missing on October 31. Of course, she reported her as “Star” Tomson aka Tina Tomson. The fact that most of the missing and murdered girls had so many aliases was one more burden the Green River Task Force had to juggle as investigators patiently worked their way through a morass of information.
If Tina disappeared on Halloween morning, that would have been only twenty hours after Missy Plager vanished. Tina and Paige had stood talking just before noon at 141st and the Pac HiWay, as the rainy wind ruffled their hair. They weren’t familiar with the Strip and probably didn’t realize they were right at ground zero in the south end. They were aware of someone called the Green River Killer, but Tina wasn’t afraid of him. “Star wasn’t afraid of anyone,” Paige said. “She would get in a car with anyone—she was so confident she could take care of herself.”
Tina said she was only going to work long enough to “earn the rent money.” The rent was only about $25 a night; the two girls were also trying to save money by cooking their own meals in their room.
Paige picked up a trick first and left with him for a car date. When she got back fifteen or twenty minutes later, Tina wasn’t standing by the highway, so Paige figured she either had a date or she’d gone back to their motel. It was so cold that she decided to return to the Ben Carol. But Tina wasn’t there, and she didn’t come back—ever.
Two days later, as Paige looked up and down the rain-soaked highway, a dark red pickup with a white canopy stopped and the driver signaled to her. “Didn’t you hang around with a tall blond girl?” he asked.
That made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. She shook her head slightly. He offered her money to turn a trick with him, but there was something about him that Paige didn’t like. He refused to go to her room; he wanted a car date. She didn’t go with him.