by Ann Rule
Proving that Tikkenborg had been in no trouble at all with the law since 1967, the outraged couple sued three media outlets and eventually collected $30,000.
And, all the time, he must have been watching the news coverage gleefully. He knew who the real Green River Killer was, and he enjoyed the fact that his persona as an unknown killer was getting so much attention from the media. He especially liked to see the task force members end up with egg on their faces. They had talked to him, but he was convinced they didn’t have a clue. He had completely snowed them, and they had gone off chasing somebody else.
39
COTTONWOOD PARK is just north of the Meeker Street Bridge on Frager Road, a shabby little stretch of stubbly grass between the road and the river in the eighties, with a few picnic tables gray and splintery from too much moisture and not enough maintenance. It is close to Des Moines, but I never heard of anyone actually going there on a picnic, or to swim for that matter. Beyond that, everyone who lived in the area remembered that Wendy Lee Coffield, Debra Lynn Bonner, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Marcia Chapman had been found less than half a mile away in the river. That made Cottonwood seem like a ghost park, and it hadn’t been that appealing to begin with.
In March 1986, two Kent Park Department workers discovered what appeared to be human bones at the base of a large tree in the park. There were enough bones to know that it was a young female, but not enough to identify her with the forensic science available at the time. There was no skull, no mandibles, no teeth, just a human torso and spine. It would take thirteen more years to know that this was the only part of Tracy Winston ever found. Mitochondrial DNA, which compares the unknown subject with the DNA makeup of a possible mother, verified in 1999 that the young woman left in Cottonwood Park was the tall, dimpled daughter of Chuck and Mertie Winston, the girl who had vowed to change her life just hours before her death.
Mertie had known for years that her only daughter was gone, but the knowledge that she was absolutely, finally, dead was almost too painful to bear. It always would be. The long wait had probably contributed to Mertie’s stroke at a young age, but she fought to recover—and she did. When she finally learned the truth, it seemed ironic that Tracy had been so close to home all along, even though her many moves had taken her far north of Seattle.
“I’m not going to second-guess why this happened to Tracy, and to us,” Mertie said in 2004. “God had his purpose that we had her for such a short time: nineteen years, eleven months, and two weeks.”
The spring of 1986 continued to reveal what the Green River Killer believed he had hidden forever. On May 2, 1986, an employee of Echo Glen, who was looking for a runaway teenager near a pullout off Highway 18 just south of the juncture of 18 and Highway 90, looked down and saw some weathered bones. It was Maureen Feeney, who had disappeared on September 28, 1983. Her family had reported her missing two years and eight months earlier. Maureen had been so thrilled to be living on her own near Bellevue. But she had been enticed into a dangerous life in Seattle. Ironically, her body had been left not far from her first apartment.
In June 1986, Kim Nelson’s skull and a few bones were found not far away in a deeply forested area off I-90 at Exit 38. Kim, also known as Tina Tomson, had been only a couple of miles from where Delise Plager and Lisa Yates were found in early 1984. Now her relatives would know why she hadn’t come home to Ann Arbor for Christmas. Kim’s father had died a few months before she was finally identified, and one of her sisters suffered a nervous breakdown after dealing with too many tragedies. Until there is a formal identification of the remains of a murder victim, relatives cling to a tiny glow of hope amid overwhelming anxiety. Afterward, hope is gone, and there is another phase of grief to deal with.
OFFICIALLY, there were no longer any new disappearances in the Seattle area, and the public seemed to have grown bored with an investigation that apparently had no end and no answers. In November of 1986, I was still convinced that I would soon be writing a book about the Green River murders. Because I have saved every scribbled-up calendar since 1972, it’s easy to look back and see what I was doing as long as thirty years ago. And a few words bring back images of events as if they had happened only last week.
That November I accepted an invitation from a King County deputy I had not met before to be taken on a tour of the body sites near North Bend. I figured it was an opportunity to learn the topography and the vegetation of the areas where the Green River Killer had left his tragic victims. I’d eaten many times at Ken’s Truck Stop, and each of my children had spent a week in the spring at Camp Waskowitz, but I’d never been into the woods on roads so narrow that they looked like trails.
It was a bleak, sunless day and whatever light there was had disappeared well before four in the afternoon. I must admit that I began to feel nervous, spooked, as the deputy turned into one area that looked more like a moonscape than the forests of the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. There, I had the sensation that I really didn’t know this man at all, and in the back of my mind was the knowledge that many people believed that the Green River Killer was a cop. Wondering if I had been really stupid to drive around with a deputy I didn’t know, I told him I didn’t want to see any more body sites.
But that was the climate of the times. Every woman in King County was somewhat nervous and all men were suspect.
THERE WAS GOOD REASON to be wary. Hope Redding* was neither a teenage hitchhiker nor a woman who frequented the streets. Her lifestyle was totally different from the victims of the Green River Killer. She was a professional woman, married, and extremely cautious because she had once been the victim of a sexual assault. After that, she vowed that no man would ever do that again, even if she had to die fighting him. She followed every safety guide there was, and under almost any circumstance, she would never get into a stranger’s car.
In 1986, Hope was driving home from work along a dark road in the Maple Valley area of King County. Her car sputtered and stopped and nothing she tried got it started again. A short time later, a pickup truck slowed and then pulled over to the side of the road. She watched the driver approach her car and she checked the locks on the doors. Good. All locked. He was saying something to her through the window on the driver’s side and she rolled it down only an inch.
“Pop your hood,” he shouted. “I’m pretty good at cars.”
That might be safe enough. Cell phones weren’t common in 1986 and she had no way to call for help. Her husband wouldn’t know where to look for her. She either had to trust this man to take a look under the hood, hike miles in the dark to find a phone, or spend a cold night locked in her car. She popped the hood.
The helpful stranger wasn’t a very big man; he probably wasn’t any taller than she was, and he didn’t look muscular. She could hear him tapping and banging on things as he tried to find what the problem was. Time passed and she realized he had spent twenty minutes or more trying to help her. Finally, he slammed the hood down and walked back to her window.
“I can’t fix it,” he said. “It needs parts I don’t have, but I can give you a ride to where you can call someone to come and get you.”
Hope felt guilty for having doubted him in the beginning. How many strangers would stand out in the cold rain for so long trying to help someone? She nodded, grabbed her purse, and followed him to his truck.
He didn’t say much as they headed toward a crossroads where she knew there was a 7-Eleven, and he didn’t even glance at her. He had been so nice that she decided she should give him something for the time he’d spent trying to help her. She opened her purse and began to fish around for her wallet. The driver glanced over at her in alarm.
“He freaked,” she recalled. “I think he thought I was reaching for a gun. Since he seemed so nervous, I shut my purse.”
Now she began to feel vaguely uneasy as they sped through the night. She figured it was probably because she’d just broken her own rule about getting into a stranger’s car. She saw the 7-Eleven up ahead and p
repared to hop out of his truck. But he didn’t slow down at all, and soon the convenience store was behind them, and the road ahead was even darker and less familiar. She asked him where he was going and he only grunted.
“I started swearing at him,” Hope recalled. “And I never swear at anyone. But I was yelling at him, telling him to stop and let me out. I drove my elbow into his ribs as hard as I could.”
He glanced angrily at her and Hope realized that he had never intended to stop. He turned corners again and again until she was disoriented about where she was. The road they were on now dead-ended at a junkyard of some sort. “I hit him and fought him and we were struggling inside the cab of his truck,” she said. “We fell out the door and I was fighting him on the ground. I was probably in the best condition I’d ever been in in my life—I went to aerobics three times a week—and I was not going to let him overpower me. He kept calling me ‘Bitch’ and I could tell he was terribly angry.”
As they rolled and tumbled on the muddy ground, she saw him sweep his free hand along the ground, reaching for something, a rock maybe, to smash against her head. And he was angling to get his other arm around her throat so he could crush her windpipe.
“I did what I had to,” Hope said. “I sunk my teeth as deep as I could into his arm, and he let go.”
She ran into the darkness that surrounded them, and hid. She could hear him crashing around, looking for her and she held her breath. Finally, he gave up and drove away. She managed to follow lights and find a phone, but Hope Redding would have nightmares for a long time. And many years later, when she recognized a picture of the man who might have killed her, she called the Green River Task Force.
40
ALTHOUGH Frank Adamson was doing his best to sound optimistic about the Green River investigation, it wasn’t easy. Nineteen eighty-six was almost over, and they seemed no closer to arresting the killer than they had ever been. The task force was being downsized, and Adamson had had to give the bad news to a number of detectives that they were being transferred. Twenty-five percent of the task force was gone.
The board beneath his own feet was becoming more and more unstable. He was frustrated, disappointed, sorry about the circus that the search of the fur trapper’s home had become, sad because of all the young women who were still unavenged. And he knew his time was coming.
“Vern Thomas called me in and said, ‘I don’t want any argument. The decision is made, Frank. You can remain in charge, or you can be promoted to major.’ ”
Thomas, who wouldn’t be sheriff much longer himself, offered Adamson the opportunity to command the new sheriff’s precinct that would be in Maple Valley. The unspoken alternative for Adamson was that he would be off the task force anyway.
“I took the second option,” Adamson recalled, “and Vern said ‘You made the right choice.’ ”
It felt good to get off the hot stove. Frank Adamson would be the longest surviving commander of the Green River Task Force. He had begun in November 1983, and he officially left the task force in January 1987.
Captain Jim Pompey had been with the department since 1972 and was promoted to captain in 1983, making him the highest ranking African American in the sheriff’s office. He had been in charge of the county’s SWAT Team and its marine unit. Now he moved in to head the much-reduced Green River Task Force amid rumors that it was being absorbed into the Major Crimes Unit where it would quietly evaporate. He admitted that he was not up to speed on the Green River cases, while Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Jim Doyon, Randy Mullinax, Sue Peters, Matt Haney, and dozens of other detectives who had lived and breathed the Green River story for years were familiar with every aspect of it.
Matt Haney had joined the Green River Task Force on May 1, 1985, replacing Paul Smith when Smith was diagnosed with leukemia. Sue Peters, the rookie who responded to the second Green River site in August 1982, was a detective by 1986 and had come on board the task force, too. Even though the number of investigators had shrunk, Jim Pompey would be commanding the cream of the crop.
As the Green River Task Force continued to shrink due to budget cuts, King County found money in its budget to “rehabilitate” the Green River itself—partially to take away the onus put upon it by the thirty-six unsolved murders and dozens of missing women. The county’s Natural Resources and Parks Division hired artist Michael McCafferty to design a master plan that would change the image of the Green River along its entire thirty-mile course. McCafferty suggested several educational stations, some bronze sculptures, reseeding to “help the fish,” and a small memorial of black and purple flowers to honor the murder victims. This last—unsolicited—suggestion from McCafferty alarmed the King County Arts Commission. “It’s inappropriate,” one member of the commission said. “This [serial killer] hasn’t yet been caught. He might think of it as a memorial to him. If he had been apprehended, we might feel differently.”
Left unspoken was the hope that the murders would be forgotten and the Green River would once again be known for its rippling waters, salmon runs, great blue herons, and serenity. Honoring the dead would keep reminding people of what had happened.
Linda Barker, speaking for the victims’ families, found the thought of a memorial extremely appropriate. “Society and the community need to say these girls were valuable people and their deaths mean something to us.”
In the end, the $10 million project went through with a bike and jogging path along the river, a golf course near the Meeker Street Bridge…but no remembrance at all of the Green River victims.
JIM POMPEY, the new head of the Green River Task Force, was a great guy with a booming laugh that was instantly recognizable. A graduate of Washington State University’s law enforcement program, he was a dedicated “Cougar.” A physical training enthusiast, he exercised several times a week lifting weights at a health club near the Burien Precinct. My son, Mike, also a Cougar, worked out with Pompey and another African-American officer, a member of the K-9 Unit.
“I remember him as being very strong,” Mike recalled. “And he was always looking to get more hats and shirts from WSU. Every time I went to Pullman, he’d ask me to bring him back something with the Wazzu cougar on it.”
Not surprisingly, Pompey was also an excellent swimmer and a SCUBA diver, skills that came in handy when he headed the marine unit. Seattle and King County have water in almost every direction and drowning rescues are common.
Pompey felt he was up to the challenge of catching the Green River Killer, although it wasn’t a job he had sought out deliberately. Like each new commander, he came in fresh and enthusiastic even though morale among the detectives still left was running low. Even Dave Reichert, who had been with the investigation since day one, sometimes wondered if they were ever going to catch the man who had eluded them for so long. It would be fair to say that it had become a personal life challenge for Reichert.
SOME of the preeminent suspects from the early days had long since been cleared; others remained in the “A” category, while a few moved up the dubious ladder to a point where it seemed prudent to look at them from another angle. And then there was always the chance that task force detectives might come across an entirely new suspect, a name they had not heard before.
One of the earliest suspects, when reevaluated, began to look much more interesting. The hard-won, state-of-the-art computer that Frank Adamson, Bob Keppel, Sheriff Vern Thomas, and former county executive Randy Revelle had fought for was a new and almost miraculous tool. It had taken time for clerks to enter the thousands upon thousands of tips and field investigation reports, the information about both the victims and possible suspects, into the computer. It continued to scan for connections among victims and connections between victims and possible suspects.
One name that caught the detectives’ attention was the mild-mannered man who drove pickup trucks and liked to watch prostitutes on the Strip. He appeared to have been intricately linked to the investigation. Sergeant Frank Atchley had always found him int
riguing. Matt Haney noted computer hits on his name were piling up.
The Seattle Port Authority Police, who patrolled airport property, had listed the “street name” of a pretty woman parked with him in 1982. It was an alias for Keli Kay McGinness, the beautiful blonde who was still missing after leaving the Three Bears Motel.
He was, of course, the man who had started to strangle Penny Bristow after he said she had bitten him during oral sex. He had admitted that the incident had happened.
Jim Doyon had talked to him in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Strip near the crossing where most of the dead and missing women had last been seen.
This same man lived just south of 216th off Military Road. Indeed, he lived in the house where Marie Malvar’s father and boyfriend had watched Des Moines detective sergeant Bob Fox question the owner. Fox had walked away, convinced that Marie wasn’t in his house, nor had she ever been there.
He habitually drove older pickup trucks, all of which matched the descriptions given by witnesses or women who had escaped from a man they believed to be the Green River Killer.
At the request of his neighbors, even I had turned in this man’s name in early 1987. There probably were other tips about him somewhere in the computer.
Still, in many ways he didn’t fit within the parameters of the standard serial killer profile. He was apparently happily married, a homeowner with a young son. In 1984, he had passed a polygraph regarding the murders of young women. And he’d been steadily employed at the same company—the Kenworth Truck Company where he was a custom painter—for more than two decades.
He wasn’t the typical serial killer—who was usually a loner without a lasting relationship with a woman. He wasn’t a job hopper. He wasn’t from a broken home. He’d grown up in the south end of King County and his high school was only a few blocks off the Strip, as was his parents’ home.