Schoolchildren found her body later that day in a muddy field. She was fully clothed and she had been strangled. The only suspect was a girl Virginia’s own age who had threatened her in a silly feud over a stolen coat, and that had been a year before her murder. It was unlikely that a female would have had the strength to choke Virginia to death.
Joan Conner, sixteen, had lived with her mother in a small house in the far north end of Seattle. On Thursday morning, February 4, 1982, her mother left a bus pass for Joan and suggested it was a good day for her to look for a job. Joan had dropped out of school, and she hadn’t worked since she left McDonald’s employ the previous fall.
“Okay, Mom,” she said. “But I’m going to try to sell some Campfire mints, too.”
Joan belonged to the Campfire Horizon Club for teenagers, and she had no ties at all to prostitution or First Avenue. But she encountered someone infinitely dangerous. Joan was found dead later that day. She had been beaten and strangled and her body thrown out of a car on Fremont Street near the Ship Canal. Her purse, her identification, her GED certificate were all missing.
Joan Conner’s mother, who had worried all Thursday night when her daughter failed to come home, was nervously watching the noon news the next day. She saw a young woman’s body being placed in the medical examiner’s van and she knew in her heart it was Joan. “That’s Joan. That’s Joan,” she gasped to a friend, not knowing how she knew, but feeling ice in her veins as she saw only the form in a body bag.
Tragically, she was right.
The three victims hadn’t known each other. They shared only their youth and the manner of their deaths. The public had well-nigh forgotten them by August 1982, but the detectives who worked to find their killer or killers remembered them. The question was: Were they connected to the Green River murders?
Perhaps they were, but their cases were not initially considered to be part of the Green River puzzle.
In any city of considerable size, there are always open homicide cases. Detectives work those cases they call “losers” more avidly than laymen ever realize. They do it quietly and with great determination, but they know too well the falsity of the old adage “There is no such thing as a perfect murder.”
If you use the criteria that some killers are never caught, then there are countless perfect murders. Strangers who kill strangers and move on are the most likely to evade detection. However, if they continue to kill, the chance that they will leave behind clues that can be traced back to them grows. But computers were not generally in use in most homicide units in the eighties; they were expensive, complicated, and not considered to be of much value in investigations.
Furthermore, nobody voiced a concern in 1982 that a serial killer might be loose in King County. As widespread as they are today in movies, books, and on television, serial killers were virtually unrecognized as such by the general public and by most members of law enforcement. Few had even heard the term serial killer. Certainly, Ted Bundy, with more than three dozen young female victims, was a serial killer. But when he was sentenced to death in 1979 and again in 1980, the media referred to him as a “mass murderer.”
The concept of a serial murderer—someone who killed similar victims one after another after another—had bloomed years before in the thought processes of one of the greatest homicide detectives of them all: Pierce Brooks. Confident that he was on to something way back in the fifties, Brooks did his research by visiting libraries when he was off duty, looking through old newspaper files for multiple-murder cases all across America. I remember his telling me, “Ann, there weren’t any computers for cops then. It would have taken all of L.A.P.D. headquarters just to hold one of those first computers.”
Once captain of the Homicide Unit in the Los Angeles Police Department, and later police chief in Eugene and Springfield, Oregon, Brooks wondered if criminologists had failed to recognize this kind of killer, for which he coined the term serial killer.
In March of 1983, Brooks would be responsible for a gathering of eagles among the top ranks of law enforcement to consider the problem of killers whose victim tolls rose into the double digits. He enlisted special agents in the Behavioral Science Unit (B.S.U.) of the F.B.I. and the U.S. Justice Department, along with top cops from cities, counties, and states all over America to confer at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Most of the B.S.U. special agents agreed with Brooks’s theory that there was a unique and terrifying kind of killer roving just beneath the level of our awareness across the United States.
But this was August 1982, and the first five victims found in the Green River were still deemed to be the prey of a “mass murderer.” They were not. They had, almost certainly, been killed by a serial killer, and within months, that would be understood.
The arena of forensic science has expanded again and again since 1982, and as Dick Kraske’s task force began to pencil in a rough list of young female murder victims who might be connected, they suspected that they were dealing with a force of evil far greater than the general public realized. It didn’t matter that only five young women had been found in the river, all the subsequent victims would be attributed ever after to “The Green River Killer.”
IT WAS APRIL 1982, when Theresa Kline, twenty-seven, was last seen alive in Windy’s Pub at Aurora Avenue N. and 103rd. She was a very pretty woman with long auburn hair, and people remembered her. She had planned to visit her boyfriend, a professional gambler, who was playing poker in a cardroom several blocks away. Theresa asked her friends in Windy’s if any of them were heading north after closing hours, but they all shook their heads. She smiled and said she would catch a bus or hitchhike if she had to. It was 12:35 AM when she left the tavern. Five minutes later, one of her girlfriends walked outside, headed for a nearby gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. Theresa was gone.
Less than three hours after that, Theresa’s body was found in an alley eleven blocks away. She had been manually strangled.
Theresa was a divorcée with one son and her ex-husband had custody, although she visited her little boy often. She had been very happy the night she was murdered, and she was definitely headed to meet her boyfriend. She wasn’t selling sex, even though Aurora Avenue was the north end Strip. Theresa wanted very much to have her son back with her, but she knew she couldn’t do that until she had a job, and she had started a new job the night before. Things were suddenly looking up for her.
So far, Theresa’s murder was unsolved.
Patricia Jo Crossman, fifteen, was a chronic runaway who had been arrested three times for prostitution. On June 13, she was found dead of stab wounds in the Garden Villa Apartments on S. 204th Street near the city limits of Des Moines. These apartments were near what was considered the southern tip of the SeaTac Strip.
Angelita Bell Axelson, twenty-five, had not been seen since sometime in the spring of 1982. No one kept very close track of her, and witnesses could remember only that she’d been with an unidentified man in a downtown Seattle transient hotel. Her body, badly decomposed, was found on June 18. She, too, had been strangled.
Unsolved cases involving young women were not peculiar to Seattle and King County. Snohomish County detectives, who worked in the county just north of King County, had their share, and so did Pierce County to the south. In fact, Snohomish County had a case somewhat similar to the Green River cases. It dated back to February 1982. Oneida Peterson, twenty-four, had last been seen as she waited for a bus to Marysville, Washington. Her strangled body was found on February 8, off the rural Sultan Basin Road. She had never been involved in prostitution.