by Ann Rule
Marisa turned as he started laughing maniacally. “He looked like a kid on a ride at Disneyland, his eyes all lit up and happy. With every swing of the rifle into my head, he got happier. This guy was psycho,” she wrote. “He was getting off on it! This is how he gets off! I remember his big glasses, the same style he wears today…and his hair-do the same…and his stature…not that big a man…not that small either…that same dumb sneaky look he has today. With that sly sparkle in his eyes.”
It was evident to Marisa that he had brought her to this house to kill her, but he was taking his time. “He wasn’t slamming the rifle with all his might, just cat and mouse style.”
She remembered she had Mace in her front pocket, and she squirted it in his face, but his glasses blocked most of it. “He hit me left, then right, then left, then right, and beat up my forearms pretty bad. He finally pried the Mace from my hands and began spraying it in my face. Then I began to pray. My eyes burned with excruciating pain, but I would blink often to see what he was doing.”
Now, she turned her attention to the front door, getting a mental picture of where the locks were. She lunged at the door to try to open another lock—the dead bolt. He continued to spray her with the Mace. “I grabbed a pillow on the couch near the door to protect my face. I kept him thinking he was winning so he wouldn’t get even more forceful. That would buy me time for the third lock.”
Even so, she was losing strength and felt she was going to die. “I was hurting bad and my eyes were on fire.”
Her attacker was clearly enjoying himself. “That part is very scary; seeing him be thrilled over hurting someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly—me.”
She knew she had to get out because the Mace and her injuries were wearing her down. And then, for a moment, he seemed to tire, too. With her eyes almost entirely swollen shut, she twisted the dead bolt one more time.
“To my surprise, it unbolted and the door swung open. ‘GRK’ was surprised too.” Marisa ran blindly across the street and down four houses where she knocked and called out, “Please help me!” It was about twelve thirty AM, but a woman opened the door for her and led her to the bathroom where she washed her eyes.
The police arrived, and Marisa told them that a killer had a friend of hers hostage in a house nearby. Afraid they wouldn’t believe her if they knew she was a prostitute, she lied and said he’d picked them both up at a bus stop in downtown Portland. She tried to show them the house but she could hardly see, and the homes all looked alike. There were no trucks parked outside. As she stood on the porch of the woman who had helped her, Marisa saw a big sign right at the Tigard/Tualatin Exit from the freeway. It blinked on and off: Jiggles. She’d heard of it; it was a topless lap dance place.
The police gave up their search after she admitted that she didn’t have a friend in any of the houses in the cul-de-sac.
“Please understand,” she wrote to me, “living as a sex worker, I felt I had relinquished my rights as a citizen and that I wasn’t worthy of protection. I was doing an unlawful thing even though it was in the name of survival.”
The cops drove Marisa back to downtown Portland to her car. Her car keys were missing, and it cost her everything she’d earned earlier that night to pay a locksmith in the wee hours of the morning, but all she wanted to do was go home. Her friend, Tatiana,* who also worked the premier hotels in Portland, took care of her for a few days until her bruises began to heal and she could move without pain again.
Years later, when she watched the news bulletins from Seattle, and recognized the man in handcuffs, she felt sick to her stomach. An artist who remembers details, Marisa has always believed that she escaped from the Green River Killer. “We knew many of the girls who got killed,” she wrote. “We never thought they had any family. Most of them were on drugs—methamphetamine and marijuana. Sad to say that those girls didn’t have a chance in the world, even at their young age. Many were so hooked on drugs, they would have died of an overdose. I do wonder about the ones who came up missing and are not on the GRK list. Most of them were very sweet girls. They were still children in a way.”
Marisa herself went to New Beginnings in 1985, got off the street, and changed her life completely.
45
ONE WOMAN who definitely met Bill Stevens was Sarina Caruso, forty-four at the time, who rented the basement of the house on Crestline Drive from September 1984 to January 1985. She knew Stevens as “John L. Trumbull,” and although she found him somewhat odd, she didn’t suspect he might be dangerous. Caruso, who had just gone through a divorce, worked as a nursing assistant and considered herself lucky to find an apartment that cost her only $200 a month.
In the time she knew him, she never saw Stevens/Trumbull with a date, although she sometimes heard women’s voices in his upstairs quarters in the middle of the night. He was a night owl, though, and would often be barbecuing in the backyard at two or three AM. He had no friends, and she thought he might be an undercover cop or a C.I.A. agent. He wore several different uniforms that made it look as if he worked for the gas or electric company or as a repairman. But he had a gun collection and appeared to be fascinated with crime—to the point that he hung “Wanted” posters all over his house. He wore shoes with crepe soles, which allowed him to move so quietly that he would suddenly be behind her when she hadn’t heard him approach. He also owned a lot of telephone equipment, a photocopier, and other equipment that he told her he used to analyze fingerprints. One of his many idiosyncrasies was that he would never allow anyone to take a picture of him.
Caruso wasn’t too concerned about his eccentric ways, even when Stevens stole her chain saw and her marriage certificate. She worried a lot more when she saw that he had dressed mannequins in clothes she had thrown away. And even more when he cut the female dummies into pieces.
When she found bullet holes in Stevens’s bedroom wall, Sarina Caruso gave notice that she planned to move. Stevens/Trumbull had always told her that he was adept at placing secret “bugs,” and he’d offered to bug her ex-husband. Now she wondered if he had secreted listening devices in her apartment.
On the last day she saw him, Caruso had returned to pick up the remainder of her possessions and he said to her, “How are your nerves today?” He then began locking all the doors. Nervously, she let him lead her to the basement where he showed her the secret room he had there, a room hidden behind a bookcase that would slide open when he flicked a switch. Although she had occupied most of the basement, he demonstrated how he had been able to open a secret door into her area that couldn’t be opened from her side.
That did it. Caruso grabbed her stuff and left, but not before Stevens insisted she take a dozen pornographic videotapes as a good-bye gift.
Sarina Caruso recalled Stevens’s high-pitched voice and that he perspired heavily. “There were things I wasn’t comfortable with,” she told reporters later, “but I just thought he was bizarre and antisocial. I feel dumb now. I certainly didn’t think he might be a killer.”
Perhaps he wasn’t, but William Stevens II was a man with many secrets. Fellow students at Gonzaga were shocked by his arrest for escape and burglary. A lawyer who had graduated a few years earlier and once worked with him on the Student Bar Association recalled Stevens as “very dedicated” to duties for the group, but said he seemed lacking in commitment to his law studies. He often missed class. Even with his law school peers, Stevens was mysterious. They realized later that none of them had a phone number where they could contact him directly.
They had no inkling that most of Stevens’s life was a very elaborately constructed lie. To give himself official status, he used a crossroad of a town seventeen miles south of Spokane—Spangle—where he had license plates registered to the Spangle Emergency Services and Rescue Unit. Sometimes he purported to be the director of the EMS in Spangle, and sometimes he said he was the police chief. The town wasn’t big enough to support either a rescue service or a police department.
One fellow law student knew S
tevens was intrigued at the thought of being somehow involved in law enforcement. “He told me that after he finished law school, he was going to be a motorcycle officer for the Washington State Patrol,” the man said. “That seemed bizarre. Why would he bother to go all the way through law school if that’s what he wanted to do?”
Other law students had found Stevens gregarious and likable, and always busy. But no one ever thought of him as a threat; he was just different.
All through the spring and half the summer of 1989, Green River Task Force investigators and Spokane County detectives were checking out Stevens’s life over the prior eight years. Satisfied that they had more than enough to go on by July 12, they obtained search warrants for two residences in Spokane. One was the home where Billy Stevens had grown up, and where he still had a room in the basement, and the other was a rental home his parents owned. The search warrants were very long and complicated, listing dates and times of the disappearances of the victims, followed by Stevens’s whereabouts during those periods. It did appear that his constant sweeps around Northwest highways placed him close by when many abductions took place. The warrants also specified all kinds of police paraphernalia, records, credit card slips, suspicious books and photos, videotapes, and other items they hoped to find among Stevens’s possessions.
There were, however, more reasons than just his proximity to the crime scenes. Stevens had made his feelings about prostitutes known to some of his acquaintances. One—perhaps his closest friend and a former classmate at Gonzaga—was a lawyer and a Spokane County deputy public defender named Dale Wells, who was also thirty-eight and single. Wells had acknowledged to Spokane County detectives that he and Stevens were close friends and had often discussed criminal cases, especially the crimes of Ted Bundy. Another topic that interested Bill Stevens was prostitution. He had denounced prostitutes to Wells and said they spread AIDS.
“He talked about them a lot,” Dale Wells said, emphasizing that Stevens had demonstrated “extreme hatred” for anyone who resisted him and often said of his perceived enemies: “They need to be killed.”
While Stevens appeared to have no romantic relationships with women, Dale Wells was involved with a woman he cared deeply for—and she for him. He appeared to be a sensitive and honorable man, and he was very troubled when Stevens became the top suspect in the Green River murder cases. Wells, whose career was dedicated to representing indigents, many of whom he thought were falsely accused, agonized over betraying his friend.
On the other hand, he was an attorney, sworn to uphold the law, and he felt he had to tell investigators what he knew. He also regretted that he had given Stevens two handguns, one of which was a .45-caliber pistol. That had resulted in federal charges against Stevens for being a fugitive felon in possession of a firearm.
If Stevens berated Dale Wells for turning against him, there was no proof. He may not have even known about Wells’s defection from his camp. And he was still possessed of the braggadocio that marked his personality. He had to be placed in an isolation section in the King County Jail after he told a judge that he had two hundred pages of notes from his interviews with another prisoner who was a convicted murderer. Stevens said he planned to use that information in a thesis to help him earn his Ph.D. in psychology. That put him in the “snitch” category, more than enough to make him a pariah in jail.
When asked how he supported himself during his eight years of freedom after his 1981 jail escape, Stevens said he made a good living buying and reselling cars, and that he was currently applying for an auto dealer’s license.
Deputies and detectives served the search warrants in Spokane and came away with more than forty boxes and bags, many containing pornographic material, dozens of photos of nude women in sexually explicit poses, some with Stevens, and eighteen hundred videocassettes. Detectives would have to view all of that material, looking for a familiar face. Perhaps some of the Green River victims’ images might have been caught in Stevens’s massive collection.
No one envied the detectives who drew the assignment of wading through the stultifying XXX-rated material that the seemingly affable law student had managed to hide in his parents’ home and rental property. If any of the victims’ photos were in the boxes and bags, what were the chances they would be recognizable? So many of the dead teenagers had dyed their hair, worn wigs, and changed their makeup, that it had been nearly impossible to spot them in mug shots. Stevens’s collection of grainy, amateurish porn videos made it difficult to recognize familiar faces.
Stevens himself, still in the King County Jail on his earlier charges, issued a statement that came exactly seven years after the day Wendy Coffield’s body was believed to have been discarded in the Green River. If he knew that date was a grim anniversary, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he was outraged and stunned. “I am not the Green River Killer,” he said through his attorney. “The Green River Task Force has not treated me or my family fairly. They have made me out to be a very bad person and I am not. People should know the fact that I have never hurt anyone in my life.
“If I knew anything about any of this, I would have told the task force long ago, but now I fear I have become the excuse for the time and money they have spent.
“I will discuss the matter in an orderly and honorable fashion in a court of law.
“The task force has put my family and me through a living nightmare that I would wish on no one. I want to serve out my remaining few months and get on with my life.
“Thank you.”
HIS FAMILY was going through a “living nightmare,” although the task force investigators hadn’t caused it. They were only doing their jobs. Bill Stevens’s brother had been taking care of their elderly parents. Their mother, Adele Stevens, had died earlier in July, and William Stevens Sr. was suffering from advanced brain cancer. No one could estimate what emotional pain Billy Stevens had caused them over the years.
Everyone who followed the seven-year plague of the Green River Killer had settled on a favorite suspect. And so had I. I was convinced in July of 1989 that William Jay Stevens II was the serial killer the task force had hunted for so long. Everything seemed to match my preconceived ideas of who the killer was: a middle-aged male Caucasian, very intelligent, a sociopath with charisma and cunning, perhaps someone pretending to be a police officer, someone who traveled continually, and who liked playing games with real cops.
I hedged my bets a little when I was contacted by reporters, although I did say I believed that charges would soon be forthcoming in the Green River murders. I had a contract to write about the Green River Killer, and I was finally ready to start my book.
I had even more reason to believe I had chosen the real Green River Killer a few months later. On Friday, September 21, 1989, I drove the three hundred miles from Seattle to Spokane where I was to teach a number of seminars over the weekend for the Washington State Crime Prevention Association convention. Daryl Pearson of the Walla Walla Police Department was in charge of providing speakers for an audience consisting of police officers, attorneys, probation and parole officers, and the media. I had done a phone interview with the Spokane Spokesman Review-Chronicle that appeared in the paper just before the convention. Among other subjects, I answered questions about the likelihood that the Green River investigators were heading toward an arrest. I certainly didn’t know, but it was a subject readers always wondered about. This time, I felt as confident as some of the task force members did, and said so, although I didn’t mention the suspect’s name.
The convention was held in a Spokane hotel, and I was a little taken aback to find I was scheduled to give my two-hour slide presentation on serial killers—featuring the Ted Bundy case—four times on Saturday and twice on Sunday morning. Although I had expected to speak once on each day, there were so many attendees that every seat was full at each session, even when the folding doors between two meeting rooms were opened to double the size.
I recognized a lot of faces in the crowd, but it wa
s impossible for me to note everyone in the six different audiences. As usual, I started with childhood slides of Bundy, Jerome Brudos (The Lust Killer), Randy Woodfield (The I-5 Killer), and a number of other serial murderers I’d written about, and moved on to their progression from exposing and/or voyeurism to rape to murder. At the end of each session, I answered questions from the audience. I wish that my memory was better, but I can’t say if Dale Wells attended any of my seminars. If he was there, there was nothing about him that caught my attention.
By the time I drove home on Sunday, I was exhausted.
On Tuesday morning, Dale Wells’s landlady unlocked the small apartment he rented. She hadn’t seen him coming or going for a few days, and the woman he dated steadily was very concerned about him because she hadn’t been able to get in touch with him.
He was there, lying on his sheetless water-bed mattress, but he was dead. Sometime over the previous weekend, he had killed himself with one blast of a shotgun to his head. No one who knew him had any warning whatsoever that he was depressed or troubled enough to commit suicide.
The next day, I got a phone call from Detective Jim Hansen of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. He asked me what I could tell him about Dale Wells. Baffled, I said I didn’t know anyone named Dale Wells. Hansen told me that Wells had probably committed suicide sometime on Saturday. He had left no suicide note, but I was shocked when Hansen said, “He left a letter addressed to you, though…”
I explained that I had been in Spokane that Saturday and asked Hansen what the letter said. He read it to me and said he would mail me a copy. For the first time, I learned who Dale Wells was, and that he had been subpoenaed to appear before an upcoming grand jury empaneled to decide whether William Stevens II would be tried as a fugitive in possession of a firearm. Hansen said that there was no indication at all that Wells himself had been involved in any criminal activity.