Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  Marie’s license had been found near Gate B-4 at the airport by Michael Meadows, a maintenance worker for American Building Maintenance (ABM) while he was vacuuming on May 27, 1983, and he turned it in to Lost and Found, who then gave it to the Green River Task Force. But Sonya insisted that the airport had lost it and the task force didn’t know about it. Eventually, she went on the Internet and hooked up with a self-styled female private eye in Texas who had also logged on to a chat room where the Green River murders were discussed constantly.

  It was the kind of case that attracted wannabe detectives. Everyone in Seattle seemed to have a theory, but the prevailing rumor was still the one that said the Green River Killer was a cop. Four of the names people gave me as “absolutely, surely, the GRK” were detectives I had known for years. After a while, if I thought about it enough, I could almost begin to wonder if I had ever really known them.

  They had ex-wives, too, and two different women called about two different cops they’d been married to once. One even said coyly, “Ann, you know him. You’ve had lunch with him.”

  That was a little creepy, but I’d had lunch with hundreds of detectives over the years. I hated the guessing games, and I was grateful when the officers’ names were cleared.

  No forensic technique was considered too strange to try in the search to identify either the victims or the killer himself. Some of the detectives were open to listening to psychics. Dowsers (who seek water in the ground with a forked stick) were encouraged to try to locate bodies, and a number of informants had been hypnotized to see if their unconscious minds would bring forth more specific information.

  Betty Pat Gatliff was a forensic sculptor in Oklahoma. Along with a handful of forensic anthropologists and artists, Betty Pat’s forte was to put faces on skulls where there was no flesh left. It sounds like a grisly kind of artistry, and it wasn’t something I ever thought I could watch, much less do. I’d met Betty Pat once at a forensic science conference where I was presenting a seminar on Ted Bundy, and she called me when she came to Seattle. She invited me to join her at Dr. Don Reay’s medical examiner’s headquarters, which was then at Harborview, our county hospital facility. A little reluctantly, I accepted. At the M.E.’s office, I looked at the four boxes that held the numbered bones of the unknown victims as she selected a skull. I reminded myself that these bones had once been young women who deserved to have their identity known and to have funeral services and a decent burial or cremation.

  Betty Pat began with the skull from the remains found in September 1983, beside the Star Lake Road. It had been steam cleaned and sterilized. Trying to see it through Betty Pat’s eyes, I realized that all skulls don’t look alike. There were many individual characteristics. The high cheekbones on this one suggested an American Indian heritage.

  Betty Pat showed me how she attached erasers from ordinary pencils to the face portion. She’d found that thickness matched the skin and underlying tissue of most subjects. Then she began to add claylike “flesh” to bring out the features. Of course, if the person had been very fat or very thin, this method might not be accurate, but there was no way to tell because we didn’t know whose face we were trying to bring back.

  Carefully patting on clay, Betty Pat filled in the space between the erasers, and someone’s face did emerge. When she was satisfied, she added dark brown glass eyes, eyebrows, and a dark wig.

  We stood back, wondering. Who are you?

  But this was not an infallible means of identification. It’s impossible to know how much soft tissue—lips or the tip of a nose—was once there. Gender and racial characteristics can usually be determined by jaws and foreheads and teeth, so it’s easier to know what color hair and eyes to add, but not always.

  Had this woman plucked her eyebrows? What about makeup and the length of her hair? Was it straight or curly? Forensic artist Frank Bender of Philadelphia says he “talks” to the skulls he works on and gets a remarkable sense of who they were and what they looked like. Betty Pat Gatliff relied more on bone structure.

  Although we didn’t know it then, we were working on Gail Mathews—whose lover had seen her riding in the old truck with a stranger, and she looked right through him. She must have been very frightened not to call for help. Her clay face was calm now, and inscrutable.

  When I looked at a photograph of Gail later, I saw that she had inordinately large lips, as if she had overdone collagen injections. But they didn’t use collagen cosmetically in 1983; hers were naturally lush, so full that there would have been no way for us to recreate her real face.

  Gail had not been the only victim left near the Star Lake Road. On March 31, 1984, six months after her remains were discovered there, a mushroom hunter moved through the shadowy trees along the ravine and came upon a human skull on the east side of the road. He backed out of the woods and called the King County Sheriff. Within a short time, Frank Adamson had gathered his crew of detectives and Explorer scouts. This was another very, very difficult region to search. The man who had left so many bodies seemed to prefer steep inclines, and this was one of the steepest. Maybe it was easier for him to roll his victims down the hill, away from prying eyes. If he was, indeed, the guy seen in several different trucks, he might even have had some kind of winch or step that helped him lower the victims from the back of his pickup. But his plan wasn’t perfect. The trees had caught the dead girls and kept them from plunging all the way down.

  It was to be an endlessly weary day for Adamson, hampered as he was by reporters who kept trying to go into the woods and look for evidence or even more bodies. The last thing he needed was a bunch of media types messing up any evidence at this site.

  It didn’t take long to find the remainder of the skeleton that went with the skull. But as the search progressed, the task force investigators discovered two more skeletons farther down the slope. And then more. Trees nearest each body site were sprayed with orange paint so that they had some kind of center point for triangulation measurements. Detectives marked the trees nearest to the remains: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

  This would turn out to be one of the killer’s favorite places to rid himself of the women he no longer wanted. As the crow flies, it was less than a mile from the Green River, where the first five of his victims had been found.

  The woods themselves, usually silent except for the distant rushing sound of Mill Creek at the bottom of the ravine, seemed quite remote. But the site was close to Pac HiWay, although 272nd was considerably south of where the Strip ended. To the east, Smith Brothers’ Dairy had dozens of milk trucks coming and going, and young families were building houses along 55th South and Star Lake Road. It would have been difficult for the killer to bring a body here in the daytime. After dark, it was possible that no one had ever seen him.

  All weekend long, reporters lit on Adamson like mosquitos. At the time, he had no media spokesman to deflect questions, and everywhere he turned he stumbled over another reporter. He was a man who was seldom impatient or moody, but this was a bad two days. By the time he got back to task force headquarters, Cookie Hunt was waiting for him, having dogged his steps at Star Lake Road. “Cookie was so pushy,” Adamson said. “When I went back to my office, I had 128 phone calls and messages, and I had had it. I found her very antagonizing that day.”

  He was exhausted. They all were. Officially, they now had twenty bodies. Adamson suspected that this was only the tip of the iceberg. When Dr. Don Reay and Bill Haglund let him know the identities of the latest victims located, it was clear that the killer was working with a kind of maniacal organization. As Pierce Brooks had suspected, the GRK obviously had his private dumping sites waiting before he went out to kill.

  First, he’d used the Green River, and then the deserted blocks around the airport, then Highway 410 near Enumclaw and the mountain foothills off Highway 18, and finally Star Lake. There might be even more cluster sites.

  The Star Lake Road victims were identified as Terry Rene Milligan, gone from the Strip on August 28, 1982—
found on April 1, 1984; Delores Williams, missing from the Strip on March 8, 1983—found on March 31, 1984; Sandra Kay Gabbert, missing from the Strip on April 17, 1983—found on April 1, 1984.

  (And when they finally identified Gail Mathews, they would realize that she was taken from Pac HiWay only five days after Sand-e Gabbert disappeared. Perhaps something had spooked the killer, and he had to drop Gail’s body too close to the road. That would explain why she was found first. But no one knew it was Gail until she was positively identified in February 1985, almost two years later.)

  The fourth body found off Star Lake Road was identified in the third week of April by Bill Haglund in the medical examiner’s office, using dental records. She was Alma Ann Smith, the quiet, lonely girl who once went to seventh grade in Walla Walla. She had gone off to Seattle so many times because her father lived near there, bouncing from one parent to the other.

  They did not find Marie Malvar or Keli Kay McGinness who had also disappeared in the spring of 1983.

  THE GREEN RIVER MURDERER was becoming almost legendary, a fictional character not unlike Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street or Jason in the Friday the 13th series, current movies that teenagers flocked to watch as a cast of young actors fell victim to a stealthy killer who cuts them away from the crowd one by one and then murders them. But what was deliciously scary on the movie screen was bleak and ugly in real life.

  If the killer was reading the newspapers and watching television—and the task force was almost positive he was—he was probably smiling; he was now being compared to John Gacy, Wayne Williams, and Ted Bundy in terms of body counts. And he was leading the pack.

  Indeed, there were so many girls missing now, and so many who had been found, that I caught myself referring to them by their number in terms of the sequence of their disappearances. I was horrified when that dawned on me. I never wanted to do that again, so I stayed up all night with a large piece of construction paper, newspapers, scissors, and cellophane tape. I attached their pictures to the chart, and then wrote their names, descriptions, the date they went missing, and the date they had been found. Too many of them still had a blank space in the last category. But I had memorized their names and faces, and they would be forever imprinted on my mind as real human beings, not just numbers.

  FRANK ADAMSON, the reader of poetry, knew T. S. Eliot’s work well, and he realized that April 1984 was, indeed, “the cruelest month,” at least in terms of the number of women’s bodies that were being discovered.

  Barbara Kubik-Patten, who truly felt that she was getting messages from the dead girls telling her where fellow victims could be found, sensed that Mary Bridget, Kimi-Kai, Opal, and a blond girl she couldn’t identify were talking to her, and she was extremely frustrated that the task force detectives wouldn’t pay attention to her. The only investigator who had the patience to listen to her was Jim Doyon, whom Frank Adamson termed “a sweet guy.”

  On April 15, 1984, Kubik-Patten tracked me down where I was having Sunday dinner at a friend’s house. I’d left the phone number on my answering machine in case my kids needed me. Like most of the task force detectives, I was growing weary of her insistence that she had psychic visions but that nobody would listen to her.

  Impatient that she had interrupted my rare dinner out, I finally said, “You know, Barbara, your visions are too vague. I think you’re going to have to actually find a body yourself in order to convince them. Most detectives aren’t that impressed with psychics.”

  I knew that she had been showing up at body sites and getting in the way of the investigative teams that were trying to gather evidence while they staved off the press and curious bystanders. On one occasion, Kubik-Patten and a woman friend had bulldozed their way into the woods near a body site search. They found the remains of an animal, which they believed was human, and poked at it. Unfortunately, they aroused a nest of yellow jackets. Her friend, who was allergic to bees, was stung and they had to flee in disarray.

  The Wednesday after Kubik-Patten called me, a shovel operator on a crew of loggers found human bones in a deep woods owned by the Weyerhaeuser Company. They were scattered in a fifty-square-foot area off the north end of Highway 18, near North Bend, and in an area where two victims had been located two months earlier.

  Dental records and the discovery of a mandible (lower jaw) brought quick identification. The bones were those of Amina Agisheff, thirty-seven, who had been waiting for a bus in downtown Seattle and was the first woman on the missing list. It was a surprising answer to the many questions about her disappearance. She had been the devoted mother of three children, someone never involved in prostitution.

  Even though Amina’s remains were found close to earlier skeletons, her relatives could not believe that she fit the Green River victim profile, and neither did the detectives. She was too old, for one thing, and she had never been anything but a loving and responsible mother to her children. Her ethnic background was Russian, and she was part of an extended family who were always in touch with one another. Born in New York, schooled in Paris, she was a Montessori teacher and a waitress at the Old World Delicatessen in Ballard, the Scandinavian bastion in Seattle, far, far away from the SeaTac Strip. The thought that she might have been involved with prostitution was unfathomable to anyone who knew her. Whoever killed Amina may well have climbed on board the Green River Killer’s bandwagon deliberately.

  Barbara Kubik-Patten, accompanied by her two youngest children, hurried to the area near North Bend the next noon. Barred by the yellow tape that marked off Wednesday’s search site, she entered the woods at a very similar spot a third of a mile away—also a gravel turnout from Highway 18—and began to search. She would say later that it was the voice of Kimi-Kai Pitsor that had told her to go there.

  And she found a body.

  Kubik-Patten rushed to where detectives were still processing the site where Amina Agisheff’s scattered skeleton had been found. She approached Rupe Lettich, one of the investigators who did not believe in her otherworldly messages, and tugged on his sleeve. He shooed her away, telling her she wasn’t supposed to wander onto the area being searched. She kept trying to get his attention, but Lettich had heard her cry wolf too many times. It wasn’t until Frank Adamson drove up that she found someone who would listen. He knew that she had searched for an entry into the woods that would match the Agisheff site. “She had to go quite a ways into a copse of alder trees from the pullout to find the body,” Adamson remembered. “The remains were covered with a green plastic garbage bag, and there were other bones of animals there. It was rather remarkable that she did find it.”

  With Kubik-Patten’s discovery of this unknown victim on April 19, 1984, a strange coincidence, the investigation became even more inscrutable. The skeleton under the green garbage bag was not easily identified, and she became known, pathetically, as Bones #14. It was a long time before she would be identified as twenty-two-year-old Tina Marie Thompson. She was more streetwise than many of the girls who had been abducted, had brown hair and brown eyes, and looked a great deal like comedienne Carol Burnett. She had been tall and very slim.

  BUT THERE WERE two Tinas. This Tina was not Tina Tomson aka Kim Nelson aka Star, the blond girl missing from the SeaTac Strip since the previous Halloween. She was still missing. Tina Marie Thompson had disappeared on July 26, 1983, and hadn’t been reported missing for some time.

  Could the killer possibly have known that he had killed two young women whose names were so much alike? Probably not.

  But still…

  I had to admit to being chagrined that Kubik-Patten had actually found a body four days after I’d told her that that was what it was going to take to give her credibility with the Green River Task Force, never dreaming she would actually find one. It almost made me wonder if she had any guilty knowledge of the murders. The investigators must have felt the same way. They gave her a polygraph test, and she passed. They also reasoned that it wasn’t that amazing that she had stumbled across
a victim. She had gone to the very next turnout where someone could pull off the road, and these turnouts were convenient for the killer; he had used them a lot. It might very well have been that deductive reasoning rather than ghostly voices had led her to pick a spot to search.

  For several days, Barbara Kubik-Patten made headlines in Seattle papers, something she appeared to want for the previous two years. She explained to Mike Barber of the Post-Intelligencer that she had seen the Green River Killer twice.

  Her first encounter had been, of course, at the Green River itself, where she saw the white car racing away. Now, almost two years later, she was able to give Barber a more precise description. She said she had heard a scream near the river and she and a male friend, whom she did not name, had seen the tall killer, but only in profile, as he walked across a clearing and got into a car. “He’s white,” she said firmly, “has brown hair, thin legs, and I’m not sure of his age, but he walks with a long stride—with long, slow-swinging arms.”

  She even had a sketch artist draw a picture of how she pictured the killer in her mind. She recalled that his car was “souped-up.” She said she’d reached speeds of sixty miles an hour herself as she tried to catch his car, but he’d taken the curves like a professional driver. Where this driving feat took place is the question. Anyone driving that fast on Frager Road would surely have ended up in the river itself. The roads leading up the hill had such tight curves that nobody could go that fast without crashing.

  Barbara Kubik-Patten announced that the Green River Killer was an “absolute genius” at getting rid of bodies, and she felt he had had some kind of special training that allowed him to outsmart the police crime lab. She also felt that the skeleton she found and that of Amina Agisheff held physical evidence that would allow the detectives to catch him.

  Kubik-Patten believed she had vindicated herself, and she continued to show up at crime scenes and scan newspaper pictures of the victims so she could keep “in touch” with them more tightly.