by Ann Rule
Tikkenborg cruised in his truck at night and kept a red police bubble light in it. He also had displayed a pair of handcuffs and a police badge shaped like a star. He said he’d stolen it and a gun from a police car in Auburn. He often came to work after being out all night “trapping,” and both he and his truck had “a foul odor.”
The most bizarre thing Tikkenborg’s co-worker recalled, however, was the time Tikkenborg showed up with a mannequin he said he’d found in the woods. He kept it in his truck after that, covered with a tarp, and often slashed at it with his scalpels.
In November 1985, task force investigators had interviewed a Washington State Wildlife Control Agent who worked for the Department of Game. He recalled Barney Tikkenborg very well.
His trapping activity peaked between 1976 and 1981, but after that it had dropped off. During his most active years, Tikkenborg had run as many as 125 registered traplines. Moreover, he’d been one of only four trappers who frequented the Green River area during that time.
The wildlife agent said that Tikkenborg’s other trapping areas were around Enumclaw, North Bend, and the Seattle-Tacoma area. He was required by law to keep records on every animal he killed, and he was “a fanatical record keeper. His tally sheet for the 1979–1980 trapping season showed he’d killed 103 cats and seventy dogs.”
In 1978, the trapper was arrested on Mercer Island where trapping was illegal. He had once put homemade decals on the doors of his green Ford pickup truck apparently to create the impression that he was a wildlife agent. That gave him the chance to trap out of season. When the real agent talked to the task force detectives, he said that he had advised Tikkenborg that his animal skins were obtained out of season and would be seized by authorities, to which Tikkenborg had a surprising reaction: “He broke down and wept.”
Ever since Barney Tikkenborg’s name had leapt into the “A” category for the task force, detectives had located and interviewed people who had known of his activities, and a sickening image grew more and more detailed. His cruelty to animals and his preoccupation with sadism and death had been noted by many people.
In early January 1986, Frank Adamson read yet another report of an interview with an acquaintance of the trapper. It said he killed animals with an ice pick shoved into the spinal column at the base of the skull. This acquaintance also said that the trapper was obsessed with sex and was drawn to danger.
The Green River investigators learned that Tikkenborg had been a hyperactive child who ran around the neighborhood and had once come close to drowning. His mother, who had been divorced four times, chose an odd way to keep him indoors. She made him wear a dress. That had embarrassed him so much that he never went outside. According to a police officer who knew Tikkenborg, he had heard from one of the trapper’s siblings that his mother had once tried to kill him when he was a child because she didn’t want him.
Silently and carefully, task force officers and F.B.I. agents spread out to talk to a half dozen or more witnesses who knew Barney Tikkenborg. They would try to conduct concurrent interviews so the word that they were homing in on the trapper wouldn’t reach him or the media.
Another fur trapper recalled that Tikkenborg had taken him into the woods to show him trapping methods. He had watched as Tikkenborg pulled his set lines. He agreed to go with detectives into the areas where Tikkenborg had placed his traps. He wasn’t sure if he could find the exact spots again, but he said he would try. Tikkenborg had always used natural landmarks and milepost numbers along the roadways to locate his traps and he kept a loose-leaf notebook listing each trap’s position.
For the entire day of January 23, 1986, detectives traversed roads that were all too familiar. They went first to the Enumclaw area, coming within several miles of where the bodies of Debbie Abernathy, Mary Bello, and Martina Authorlee had been found. Their potential witness also took them to the Green River, to within four hundred yards of the spot where Wendy Lee Coffield’s body had been found floating. Next, they went to the Mountain View Cemetery, and to Star Lake Road where the informant said Tikkenborg had set his traps at both the bottom and the top of the ravine.
Finally, they went to areas near Jovita Road and Soos Creek, and the novice trapper pointed out the exact spot where Colleen Brockman, the girl with braces on her teeth, had been discovered. Yvonne Antosh’s remains had been left directly across the road.
Tikkenborg matched both John Douglas’s and John Kelly’s profiles more closely than any other suspect. The circumstantial evidence was piling up, and for the first time in many months, Frank Adamson felt excited that the long hunt might be over. That excitement increased when one of the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, who had come from a family familiar with trapping in his home state of Florida, explained about “drowning rocks.”
He said it wasn’t unusual for hunters or trappers to submerge their game in cold water to preserve it. To keep the carcasses below the surface of the water, logs and large rocks were placed on top of them. “Sometimes they place smaller rocks inside body cavities to be sure they don’t get carried downstream,” the agent said.
TIME was growing short. A reporter for a Seattle all-news radio station had been watching the Green River Task Force for months and had picked up the focus on Barney Tikkenborg. By following police units, he saw who they were following, and it was Tikkenborg, who was himself visiting the areas of some known body sites. When the reporter approached Adamson and asked why Tikkenborg was under such heavy surveillance, Adamson beseeched him not to break a story about the trapper. Yes, they were looking closely at him, but if it hit the media, the suspect would have an opportunity to get rid of evidence before the task force could obtain a search warrant.
The reporter said he would sit on the story, but only if Adamson let him have the first interview if they arrested Tikkenborg. Caught between a rock and a hard place and having, once more, to dodge the swarm of the hovering media, Adamson promised the reporter he would get the first word that an arrest had been made.
“I said arrest,” Adamson recalled, “and he took it that I would alert him before we served a search warrant. I never promised him that—I couldn’t. I wasn’t even sure when we’d get a search warrant. He called me and told me he was going out of town and asked if that was a good idea. I couldn’t tell him. As we got closer, the media was buzzing.”
The newscaster, sensing that something was about to come down, decided to stay in Seattle, just in case.
On February 6, F.B.I. special agents Duke Dietrich and Paul Lindsay, and task force detectives Matt Haney and Kevin O’Keefe set out early in the day to talk to Barney Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Back at Green River headquarters, Frank Adamson was writing an affidavit to obtain search warrants for Tikkenborg’s house, his mother’s house, his two pickup trucks, and another truck located at his mother-in-law’s house, which had been cut in two with an acetylene torch and then burned.
The specific items the task force searchers were looking for were women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry and purses, notebooks and other documentation of Tikkenborg’s trapping activities, weapons such as ice picks, knives, garrotes, scalpels and guns, newspaper clippings or photographs of the Green River victims, trace evidence like hair, fibers, blood or “particles,” latent fingerprints of the dead and missing women, and implements and solutions that would commonly be used to clean up the evidence of the crime of homicide. Adamson also listed control samples of carpeting, fabrics, and paint chips from various surfaces, floors, furniture, drapes, and clothing—all to be compared to fibers and particles found with the victims’ remains.
As it turned out, there was no need for a search warrant at the home of Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Mick and Ruthie Legassi* readily agreed to sign a Consent to Search form. They had no objection to detectives looking around their house. And they were quite willing to be interviewed. Paul Lindsay and Kevin O’Keefe interviewed Tikkenborg’s mother, while Dietrich and Haney talked to his stepfather.
Mick was Ruthie’s fourth husband, and he admitted that her son had resented his marrying Ruthie at first. Young Barney Tikkenborg had lived with his father until he was about fifteen. Subsequently, he lived with the Legassis and other relatives. He wasn’t the kind of person to show his feelings, except when he was talking about hunting and fishing, so his stepfather never knew if moving from one relative to another had bothered him.
Early on, Barney had gotten in trouble for stealing things, and he’d had a brush or two with the law over thefts and burglaries that he had told Legassi he committed for “the thrill of it.” He was tossed out of the service after he was convicted of theft from a footlocker in his barracks.
Initially, Barney Tikkenborg hadn’t had much luck with women. His first marriage lasted only a year, and he was “shook up” when his bride left him for another man. He’d gone off to Alaska to hunt and fish for a year, but when he came back, he married again—a Canadian girl. She was the daughter of his father’s current wife—not a half sister but a stepsister. When he got arrested for burglary again, she left him, too.
Tikkenborg made a third try at marriage. He had a daughter by that wife, and the three of them lived in the Seattle area where he worked as a cement finisher. But periodically, he would be arrested for burglary and have to serve time. His third wife left him while he was in prison.
Duke Dietrich worked hard to keep up with this very complicated family tree, convoluted because so many of them had had multiple marriages. In the late seventies, Tikkenborg’s stepfather said that Barney had dated a checker at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket located near the Jovita Canyon. She had grown up on a farm in Enumclaw, and while they did not marry, she did introduce Barney to his fourth, and current, wife. They had lived first inside the city limits of Kent, off 192nd Street. And they seemed to have had a good marriage. If Barney teased his wife by talking about other women, she came right back at him.
“They’re pretty much equals,” Legassi said. “She doesn’t take any shit off him.”
Tikkenborg’s stepfather didn’t recall that Barney had ever commented on prostitutes one way or the other. Yes, he’d mentioned the Green River murders once or twice, but only in passing. “One time he said that there was a screwball on the loose. We talked about it a little.”
The closest Tikkenborg had ever come to showing his feelings about loose women was when he had put a sticker on his truck that read “Good Girls Go to Heaven; Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” But that was only a joke.
Legassi said that Barney hadn’t seen anything wrong with his trapping activities, and he’d made good money at it—running three hundred traps at one time. “He said that we’d be overrun with them critters if nobody trapped them.” He recalled that Barney trapped muskrats, beavers, and bobcats in the deep woods, raccoons in the airport area, and coyotes near Enumclaw.
“How does he kill them?” Dietrich asked quietly.
“By sticking ice picks into the back of their brain or stepping on their chests,” Legassi said. He added that Barney had once used a small pistol, but had stopped that because it made too much noise. Yes, he knew that sometimes his stepson had shot dogs in the woods so they wouldn’t get into his traps and tear up his animals. But he’d always had pets at home, both dogs and cats. “He told me that shooting dogs in the woods is ‘purely business.’ ”
Mick Legassi confirmed that Ruthie had once put a dress on her son because he’d disobeyed and gone down to a creek, and she was afraid he was going to drown. But it was only that one time. He couldn’t remember that Barney had ever had mood swings or acted crazy.
All in all, Legassi thought his stepson was a good guy. “If he’s the Green River Killer—and I don’t think he is,” he said firmly, “well, he would say so!”
FRANK ADAMSON got his search warrant, and later that Thursday evening, February 6, 1986, detectives and F.B.I. agents swarmed over the Tikkenborg house, which was located on a short private street a block from Pac HiWay. Neighbors watched in shock as a hooded figure, whom they assumed to be Barney, was taken away in a police car, and detectives and agents carried out items to be tested.
The hooded figure was not Barney Tikkenborg. He had been detained on his way home from a cement finishing job near Snoqualmie Pass when the car he was riding in was sandwiched between unmarked police units that suddenly flashed blue “bubble lights” on their dashboards. With guns drawn, several task force members and F.B.I. agents ordered him out of his boss’s car.
His wife, Sara,* was being picked up at her job at the same time. Both were transported to F.B.I. headquarters in downtown Seattle.
Several of the Tikkenborgs’ neighbors were coaxed to comment on-camera by television crews. Their words sounded like every neighbor’s in every shocking murder, fire, natural disaster, or tragedy in any neighborhood in any city. “I can’t believe it. They’re such a nice couple. Such good neighbors…This just doesn’t happen in a neighborhood like ours.”
If ever a police operation was compromised by a determined army of reporters and photographers, this was it. Helicopters hovered overhead with floodlights illuminating the scene and reporters got in the way of the task force investigators. Over at task force headquarters, Fae Brooks did her best to placate the reporters who surrounded her. “We have made no arrests. We are talking to a person of interest.”
The public’s right to know, and to know immediately, was obviously tantamount in the media’s minds and conflicted with the task force’s urgent need to do what it had to do.
Given the information the Green River Task Force had gathered on Barney Tikkenborg, surely the probable cause for a search warrant had been met. But the Tikkenborg incident was to be a major public relations disaster. And there was no reason that had to happen. Without the glare of strobe lights and the intrusion of microphones, the search warrant could have been served quietly without undue attention on the family that lived there.
Tikkenborg was questioned for several hours by Jim Doyon of the task force and an F.B.I. agent. He denied having any knowledge whatsoever about the Green River murders, which wasn’t surprising. Of course, they had expected that. No suspect was likely to say, “I did it! I killed them all!” the first time he was questioned. Tikkenborg was angry and his wife was angry. He volunteered to take a lie detector test.
And he passed. Absolutely passed. It was a major blow to the task force and to Frank Adamson personally. He had been so sure, and his expert advisers had concurred. They had believed they had the right man. And now it seemed that all their deductive reasoning had been wrong. They had no choice but to release Tikkenborg.
Criminalists continued to evaluate possible evidence taken from his home: all the bloodstained items, which they had expected to find, of course, all the hairs and fibers. But, in the end, Barney Tikkenborg was eliminated as a suspect in the Green River murders three months later.
By reading the next day’s papers and tuning into television, it had certainly looked as if the long investigation was over. Headlines blazed; the entire front pages of both Seattle papers trumpeted the news, and smaller local papers echoed the story. Some printed Tikkenborg’s name and address, while others did not. Some featured a picture of his house with the address clearly visible on a shingle outside.
Frank Adamson faced the wrath of the reporter who had agreed to hold back his scoop. Adamson met with him and explained the truth—he had promised only to give the man first chance for an interview after an arrest was made. As it was, it had been completely out of his hands anyway as the feeding frenzy of the press and airways proliferated.
“I met him in a restaurant in Fremont and he was mighty upset,” Adamson said. “But as it turned out, we ended up arresting the suspect, took him to the F.B.I. office and he passed the polygraph. That became my downfall. We made the search, we got bad publicity, and it was an opportunity for the politicians to plan to get rid of me because it was a low point. We’d focused a lot of our energy and the press’s energy on the wrong guy. I felt
like I was standing on a board when someone was sawing through the other end.”
Technically, Adamson would be on the task force from December 1983 to January of 1987, but he sensed which way the wind was blowing. He had begun with the belief that he and his detectives would surely solve the murders of the dead girls, but he was worn down, battered on every side. It was ironic. A public and press that had shouted that the task force must “do something” was now eager to condemn them because they had done something, and it proved to be wrong.
As the task force members had expected, Tim Hill, the new King County executive, held the opinion that it was always better to “spend less,” and the Green River investigation was draining the county’s coffers.
“There was publicity about the cases,” Adamson said, “but also publicity about the expense of the task force. People complained. After the search on Tikkenborg’s house, it got worse. I didn’t feel that just because we couldn’t prove that this particular person did it, it was the end. There were other suspects.”
That was true, but being on the Green River Task Force was hard going now.
Both the media and the detectives were being judged harshly. More than two months after the search of Barney Tikkenborg’s house and the abortive probe into his life, the Los Angeles Times printed a very long article on the front page of its Sunday edition, tsk-tsking about the “near hysteria” caused by Seattle’s television coverage of the detainment of an innocent suspect, and taking swipes at both TV newscasters and the task force. However, the Los Angeles Times article also listed the real names of the fur trapper and his wife, perpetuating, it would seem, the attention focused on them.