ONE OF THE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN VICTIMS that Gary Ridgway presented to his questioners was Roberta Hayes, twenty-one. She was “Bobby Joe” to her family. She had rounded cheeks and a wide smile, resembling Sally Field in her Flying Nun role. Despite her hard life, Bobby Joe looked younger than her years. But she had lived and lost so much in two decades, always seeking love and a permanent place that would be home to her. She was raised by her father and her stepmother, but she struck out on her own at the age of twelve, ill equipped for the challenge of the streets. Bobby Joe may have been running away from housework and child-care responsibilities at home. And yet she would give birth to her first child at fifteen and to four more in the next six years, all of them released to state agencies to be adopted.
Bobby Joe could be counted upon to show up at her maternal grandparents’ house for Christmas and her birthday. She said she wanted to live with them, and while she was there, things were fine. But the lure of the streets always took her away. She was two people, really, trusting and almost naive when she was with her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and brothers, but flinty and obstinate when they ran into her on the streets somewhere, even though they pleaded with her to walk away from that life. No one in her family could totally convince her of how much they loved her. It was as if the time to be loved had passed her by and she could no longer accept it without question.
Bobby Joe had close companions in “the life,” and she was drawn to them, too. She was a good and faithful friend. She usually worked the Aurora Avenue red-light area, a petite blond, blue-eyed girl who looked totally out of place. She didn’t hate cops, and often stuck her head into a police unit to say “Hi” to the patrol officers who were trying to clean up the street. They tried to reason with her, too, but no one could warn her convincingly enough that she was playing with danger.
Sometimes Bobby Joe Hayes was far from home—in Sacramento, California, or in Portland. The last time anyone recalled seeing her she was in Portland, and it was February 7, 1987. Police in the Rose City had picked her up for prostitution and released her when she said she intended to go back to Seattle.
For some reason, she was never on the Green River victim list either. Looking back, February 1987 was a period when Gary Ridgway felt very confident that he would never be identified. Matt Haney’s April 8 search warrants wouldn’t be served for two months, and Ridgway had no idea that he was under surveillance.
At some point, he slid under the radar and killed Bobby Joe Hayes. As usual, he remembered very little about her. He thought she had had blondish brown hair and been “skinny.” In 2003, he was able to draw an accurate map of the dead-end road off Highway 410 where he had left her body and, later, lead detectives to the site.
All the sixteen years Bobby Joe had been gone, her family had hoped that she would pop in at Christmas or for her birthday, yelling “Surprise!” Of course, as time passed, that possibility waned. But they didn’t know what had happened to her—not until the investigators called them in the first week of November 2003 and told them that Ridgway had confessed to killing Bobby Joe. It was both a gift and a heartbreak. They no longer had to worry if she was lost, trapped, or in pain, but they knew she was gone forever.
Marta Reeves was a delicately featured brunette woman of thirty-six, estranged from her husband and her four children, and seriously addicted to cocaine. Her only way to live and to feed her habit was to prostitute herself, and she worked the Central Area in Seattle, caught in an increasingly downward spiral. She called her husband asking for money sometime in March 1990, and he told her no. “Okay,” she said wearily, “then I’ll have to work all night.”
That was Marta’s last contact with anyone who knew her. In April, her husband received an envelope with the U.S. Postal Service’s return address. Inside was Marta’s driver’s license, which had either been found and turned in to a post office or dropped into a mailbox. By the time her husband took it to the police, it was smudged with dozens of fingerprints superimposed upon one another, making it impossible to find even a portion of a clear print large enough to feed into the AFIS computers.
Six months after Marta’s last phone call, mushroom hunters found scattered bones and some rotted clothing near the Highway 410 body cluster east of Enumclaw. That was in late September 1990; but it would be January 1991 before they were identified as Marta’s.
Marta’s body lay in a familiar woods that Gary Ridgway had described often during his almost daily interviews. He remembered the loop road off Highway 410 and pinpointed on the map where he had left Marta. As usual, he could not remember where he had picked her up, how he had killed her, or whether she was black or white. Six years after the height of his murder rampage, he was apparently stalking and killing less frequently, but the victims’ humanity was still meaningless to him.
ONE MURDER Ridgway admitted would never have been known had he not told the detectives about it. Originally, it had been written off as an “accidental death.” Patricia Yellow Robe was a tall, very thin woman, quite lovely when she wasn’t using drugs. She was a member of the Chippewa-Cree nation, registered at the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation in Montana. She’d grown up in Havre and then Great Falls as the oldest of ten children who had complicated connections because their parents had married and remarried. They were a handsome family—all of them—and many of Trish’s siblings were professionals, but she had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for most of her life. In 1998, she was thirty-eight and living her usual precarious existence.
“She was always fun,” recalled a younger sister who did legal work for a prosecutor. “She was ten years older than I was, and she took care of me—I could talk to her. She took me to the fair and on shopping sprees, and she taught me how to drive.”
The Yellow Robes’ grandmother was blind, and it was Trish who had been her “eyes,” leading her gently wherever she needed to go. But later, Trish’s lifestyle was unpredictable and she would take off on a whim. She had hooked up with men who took care of her for a while, but, inevitably, those relationships ended and her family worried about her. And then she would show up like Auntie Mame, sweep up her nieces and nephews and take them for ice cream or on some adventure. Trish had three children of her own: Diamond, Emerald, and Matthew. They were raised by their fathers or her mother, who saw they needed some stability.
“We’d lose track of Trish,” her sister said with a sigh. “We asked her just to check in with us every two or three months so we would know she was okay, and usually she would. We sat together on the porch once toward the end of her life, and she told me how much she wanted to get clean and sober. She said she was sure she could beat it. She wanted to live.
“And I told her she was going to die if she didn’t,” her younger sister said. “I told her she was stronger than that, but then bad things happened and she would be gone again.”
If Trish Yellow Robe had a new boyfriend or something else she wanted to show her siblings, she would come sweeping into their offices unexpectedly. They didn’t mind because they loved her, and when she was happy, she was fun to have around. In August of 1998, the family was planning a dinner to celebrate one brother’s birthday on the eighth. “We’d just heard from her on August 4,” her sister said, “and she was due to come for dinner on his birthday. She was planning on it.”