Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  In the end, Gary Schons, a brilliant attorney from the attorney general’s office, was appointed to oversee the investigation into alleged police misconduct. He cleared the San Diego force of any involvement with the prostitute murders.

  Dave Reichert was interested in the apparent similarities between the Green River victims and those in San Diego. He made one of the many flying trips he’d taken over the years to other jurisdictions and talked to the detectives in San Diego. If there were only some way to link a King County suspect to San Diego, it might be possible to compare times and dates. But nothing came of the California connection, although Norm Stamper isn’t sure that is a closed door.

  The man eventually convicted of the murder of Donna Gentile was a former marine and mechanic, a traveler who liked to drive up and down the West Coast. Citing fiber and other trace evidence, San Diego detectives were able to implicate him in almost two dozen of their cases. He is currently serving twenty-seven years to life in a California prison.

  No one on the Green River Task Force knew in the late eighties that one of the men they’d talked to a number of times on the highway near the Seattle airport had once been stationed in San Diego. Indeed, that was the first time he’d felt betrayed by his wife and begun patronizing prostitutes. However, that was long before the serial killings began in either state. And a check on the whereabouts of the man arrested in San Diego in September 1988 indicated that he had never been to King County.

  CAPTAIN BOBBY EVANS, who had once convinced Ingmar Rasmussen that his Cadillac had broken down so he could get inside the wealthy farmer’s house to find some sign of the first missing Green River victims, was now the head of the Green River Task Force. But the torch, handed down so many times, was dimming, and all the detectives working the Green River case exclusively were in danger of being swallowed up by Major Crimes until the task force itself was no more.

  ON DECEMBER 7, 1988, in what had all the signs of a last-ditch effort to bring forth vital information on possible Green River suspects from the American public, a television marathon called Manhunt…A Chance to End the Nightmare was broadcast. The show, in an America’s Most Wanted format, resulted from the efforts of Myrle Carner, a robbery detective in the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department.

  It featured interviews with the families of the murdered girls and information on dozens of homicides in other police jurisdictions, all unsolved. Patrick Duffy, who rose to television fame through his role, as “Bobby” in Dallas, hosted the special, while scores of detective volunteers answered phones. Duffy’s sister was a Seattle police officer, and they shared a tragic connection to the victims’ families. Their parents, Terrence and Marie Duffy, were murdered on November 18, 1986, by two teenagers during the robbery of their bar, The Lounge, in Boulder, Montana. Kenneth Miller and Sean Wentz, who was believed to have fired the sawed-off shotgun that killed the Duffys, were sentenced to 180 years in prison in 1987.

  Not surprisingly, Patrick Duffy had strong personal motivations for trying to find killers who roved free. The show aired all across America and Canada, attracting millions of viewers.

  F.B.I. special agent John Douglas faced the cameras to give the profile of the man they sought, and a somewhat nervous Dave Reichert sat beside him. Reichert warned the Green River Killer that he would have to pay for his crimes and asked him to turn himself in to face his punishment.

  A lack of tips and information had never been the Green River investigators’ problem. Rather, the mountains of calls, letters, and emails had almost buried them. Still, they had to hope the one vital lead that had eluded them for more than seven years might result from Manhunt. Sixteen thousand people called in that night and over the next weeks, offering almost two thousand new suspects. The majority of them were useless. However, the show did result in a possible new direction that left the task force with revived hope.

  More than one viewer called in with information about William Stevens II, suggesting that he was “weird enough” to be the Green River Killer. “Billy” Stevens was thirty-eight years old, a student at Gonzaga University’s law school in Spokane, and he was about to feel the uncomfortably hot glow of the task force’s spotlight. Initially, Stevens seemed the least likely suspect of them all. He was in his last year of law school, and he had twice been elected to the prestigious office of president of the Student Bar Association. He had friends and admirers in that group and appeared to a be a winner, if somewhat eccentric. Even so, his name began to creep into Green River news coverage in January 1989.

  On a viewer’s tip, Stevens was arrested in his parents’ Spokane home after the Manhunt program. Spokane County deputies seized twenty-six different license plates and twenty-nine guns from his bedroom. A number of the license plates had been issued to municipal departments and law enforcement agencies. He also had a Snohomish County undercover police vehicle, which he had bought at an auction and equipped as a standard police unit, handcuffs, and a motorcycle similar to those used by police.

  Stevens was the eldest of three children, all adopted by a caring Spokane pharmacist and his wife. Billy Stevens was less than a week old when they brought him home, and he grew from a chubby child to a bearlike man, tall and lumbering with a big belly. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and had tightly curled brown hair. Indeed, he looked remarkably like one of the four widely disparate sketches of the Green River Killer as described by witnesses to possible abductions.

  Just as Dick Kraske had remembered fingerprinting Melvyn Foster when Foster was first arrested in Seattle, Tom Jensen of the Green River Task Force recalled investigating Stevens in a King County burglary case nine years earlier. When Jensen heard his name, he had no trouble recalling the smooth-talking, overweight burglar he’d once interviewed. In 1981, Billy Stevens was being held in a work release unit in the King County Jail with five months left to serve. One day he was supposed to be carrying garbage out, but he’d just kept right on going.

  It was what Stevens had stolen that made him most interesting as a Green River suspect, and where he had stolen it: He had taken a police uniform, Mace, surveillance devices, bulletproof vests, and other police equipment from a store out on Pac HiWay, a business located across the highway from the Blockhouse Restaurant, kitty-corner from the Midway Tavern, and just down the block from the Three Bears Motel. Stevens himself had lived in a nearby apartment at the time.

  Now, he’d been arrested with guns, license plates issued to police vehicles, and a police car. Because of the constant rumor that the Green River victims had been killed by a policeman, Stevens’s collection of police gear and weapons put him quickly into the “A” category. He was not just a “person of interest”; Stevens looked good enough to be a “viable suspect,” although the task force was careful to keep that appellation to themselves for as long as they could. Stevens fit neatly into so many facets they sought in a suspect.

  And with good reason. The face Billy Stevens presented to the world was only a facade. In truth, he was a con man on the level of “The Great Imposter.” Ferdinand Waldo William Demara Jr. defrauded scores of people who believed he really was who he seemed to be. A brilliant con man, “Fred” Demara managed to masquerade successfully as a monk, a Canadian navy surgeon (who actually performed complicated surgeries successfully), a cancer researcher, a deputy sheriff, and a professor. Demara, who never graduated from high school, much less college or medical school, had a thirty-year career, although he was sporadically arrested for fraud, theft, embezzlement, and forgery. Had he chosen to pursue any of his “careers” legitimately, he could have accomplished the necessary education easily. Instead, he was a fraud, a man who some considered to be a true multiple personality.

  It was the same with William Stevens II. He had a solid legal education after his years at Gonzaga, but he could never have passed the bar in any state that checked his background. He had a felony police record. He had also studied psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and had allegedly grad
uated in 1979 with a degree in pharmacology. He claimed to have been a second lieutenant and a military policeman in the U.S. Army, and to have applied to the Seattle Police Department to become a patrolman. Instead, for all his years at Gonzaga, and even before that, he was supposed to be in jail.

  Stevens’s early life seemed uneventful enough. He’d been born in Wallace, Idaho, on October 6, 1950, adopted by William and Adele Stevens, and raised in a quiet neighborhood north of the Spokane city limits, attending Jesuit schools and graduating from Gonzaga High School in 1969. His father owned the University Pharmacy, a block from their home, for thirty years, hoping that his son and namesake would take over the business one day. Young Billy was not particularly close to his siblings by adoption, consumed as he was with his own hobbies and interests. He was a police buff early on, fascinated with the lifestyle and paraphernalia of law enforcement. An inordinate number of serial killers are police groupies, eager to move in the same circles as real cops.

  Although he had spent some summers working in the family drugstore, Stevens never really wanted to be a pharmacist. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to join the Seattle Police Department, but he had a lousy driving record.

  Stevens was one of the most interesting suspects yet to rise to the forefront in this marathon investigation. His photo first appeared in the media at the end of January 1989, when the handcuffed fugitive was arraigned in a King County Superior Court. His attorneys asked Judge Donald Haley to release Stevens on bail because his elderly parents were ill and needed his help. “Our position,” Craig Beles said, citing Stevens’s success in law school, “is that Bill is a remarkable example of what rehabilitation can do.”

  The judge asked somewhat wryly why Stevens hadn’t responded to two warrants for his arrest in 1981. Stevens explained that he had given police information on his fellow prisoners and he’d been afraid that, as a “snitch,” his life was in danger, so he had walked away from work release and was afraid to go back.

  In reality, he had never been a police informant.

  Where had he been between 1981 and 1985 when he enrolled in law school in Spokane? Stevens proved to have had a lifestyle so peripatetic that it wasn’t easy to trace the many places he had lived. For the moment, however, he was safely behind bars again in the King County Jail, finishing the sentence he had walked away from ten years before.

  The Green River Task Force found that Stevens had crossed the Canadian border into British Columbia shortly after his 1981 escape. There he lived as a “house guest” of a Vancouver couple for about four months. They had acquiesced to his staying there at the request of a mutual friend. They knew him as “Ernie,” and thereafter, he changed his name to “John Trumbull.” He explained that he was setting up an import business. He never seemed to have much money, but he explained that, too, saying he was waiting for funds to be released. He didn’t pay rent, but he bought some groceries, and helped with the dishes and the housework. They found him an amiable and polite guest.

  “He was very organized, tidy, and a good talker,” the husband of the couple recalled. “He dressed well and gave the impression of being an army man. He slept on a couch in the den and spent his time watching TV and reading.”

  Toward the end of Ernie/John’s time with the Canadian couple, he made several overnight trips. He said he was going to Seattle. Then, in late summer 1981, their visitor left. They weren’t sure where he was going.

  William Stevens’s/John Trumbull’s trail picked up again in a southwest suburb of Portland. He bought a house on Southwest Crestline Drive for $108,000, a Roman brick with a double garage and a daylight basement. To help with the mortgage, he occasionally took in tenants in an apartment in that basement.

  The task force looked at an Oregon map and saw that the house was within five miles of the Tigard/Tualatin site where the remains of four young women had been found, and within a mile of the location of Shirley Sherrill’s skull and the partial skull of Denise Darcel Bush.

  How Stevens supported himself was a question. Whether he was a danger to women was also a mystery. When I sorted through the hundreds of emails and notes I took during phone calls about the Green River Killer, sometimes I found circumstances and tips that seemed to match. I remember finding one that struck me as eerily connected to the time William Stevens lived near Tualatin.

  A few years after the Portland area phase of body discoveries and attacks on women by would-be stranglers, I received a phone call from a woman who lived in Washington County, Oregon. She was embarrassed and made me promise I would not reveal her name. I promised.

  “I’m married now,” she explained, “and I don’t live the same kind of life at all. But then I did pick up men at bars and taverns, and I was drinking too much.

  “I met this one guy at a tavern near Beaverton [a few miles from Tigard and Tualatin]. It seemed to me that he was taller than average, and I do remember that he had one of those great big country-western-style belt buckles. We drove out to a field that was quite a ways from the place where I picked him up. And…well, we had sex outside in a field someplace. Afterward, I started walking back to his truck and he suddenly reached out his arm and grabbed me by the elbow. I looked down and saw that I had almost fallen into what looked like an open grave. The worst thing was that there was a woman down in there, and I think she was dead.

  “When I got back to my car, I was so grateful to be alive that I just tried to put it all out of my mind. But I know there was a grave, and I know there was someone in it.”

  The “field” that the woman remembered was close to Bull Mountain Road and she believed that was where the man had taken her.

  I turned the information over to the Green River Task Force, just one of more than the thousands of possibles it would document, but I kept her name out of it. If they thought it was worth following up, I could get back to her and see if she would talk to them on the condition that she remain anonymous. I don’t know if she ever called them, although I urged her to do so.

  When William Stevens’s name came up, I remembered another woman who had written to me from Oregon. She told me her name was Marisa, and that she had once been a prostitute in Portland. She had described a shorter, thinner man than Bill Stevens appeared to be, but terror and shock can warp such perceptions.

  Marisa’s recall of her meeting with a stranger was, however, precise. I don’t know her real name, but everything she told me about life in The Camp during the early to mideighties was validated by official police files.

  Marisa has lived an entirely straight life for many years, and people who knew her after the eighties as a successful career woman would never guess what her former life was like. She was working the streets twenty years ago because she had been badly burned in an accident in a business she’d started and she was tired of being hungry and behind in her rent.

  In 1983, she was thirty but looked about nineteen. “I remember being on Third Ave and Taylor Street about eleven PM in downtown Portland when he motioned to me to get in,” she recalled. “I had been out there trying to get up rent money.” Marisa usually worked in expensive hotels, but rainy Sundays were always slow, and she broke her first safety rule by going out on the street. Halloween decorations hadn’t been taken down, so it could have been early November. She got into a shiny red Ford pickup truck, which was clean and new. “The word on the street was that the GRK was driving an old beat-up van so I figured I was safe. And besides, I told myself the GRK was in Seattle.”

  She broke her second rule, one shared by most working girls: never leave the downtown area. But Marisa was having a lucky night and had made almost all of her rent money. There were no other girls out that night and she decided to turn one more trick. “I asked him what he was interested in. He didn’t answer. He stayed quiet and drove with purpose as he headed to I-5. I thought he was just shy. I told him I didn’t want to leave downtown. He said he didn’t feel comfortable because of the cops and he wanted to go to his house.”

  She was a
bout to break the third rule of the street: never go to anyone’s house. “I thought what the heck. I can break a rule because I am on a lucky streak.”

  The man didn’t even glance at her as he raced along the I-5 Freeway, heading south, and then took an off ramp near Tigard. “He pulled into his garage and the automatic door closed behind us.” They went into his small two-bedroom house.

  She assumed he would ask for oral sex; most men did. He signed a cashier’s check for $80.00 and gave it to her. She saw the name “Robert Thomas” on it. She thought he was probably a truck driver because they often had cashier’s checks, but she was puzzled that he remained distant and seemingly disinterested in sex. “In fact he was unable to get it up. I thought well what the hell—you bring me all this way for nothing.”

  Suddenly, the stranger leapt from the bed, and grabbed a rifle from behind a door, aiming it at her. “My life flashed before me,” Marisa recalled. She assumed he was upset with her because he couldn’t achieve an erection, so she started talking loud and fast, telling him she would give back the check and she ran into the bathroom, locking the door. She was naked, a fourth rule she had broken. Frantic, she dressed hurriedly, all the time shouting through the door that she was searching for his check.

  Dressed now, she opened the bathroom door, only to find him standing there with the rifle pointed at her head. She threw the check at him, saying “Here! Here it is. Now let me go!”

  She was trying to snap him back into reality, but it wasn’t working, and he had no intention of letting her go. She darted past him to the front door, only to find it had three locks. Why, she wondered, would a man who lived on a quiet cul-de-sac need three locks? As she struggled to turn the bolt, he began to beat her on the head with the rifle’s butt.