Some of the women killed in early 1982 went on the Green River Killer victim list, and some did not. It was impossible to know if all the crimes were attributable to a single killer. Their ages and manner of death were alike, but their lifestyles differed. Ominously, the list grew longer. The entries may or may not have been correct. Some experts felt the range was too wide; others thought it wasn’t inclusive enough.

In March 1982, several girls who made their living on the streets reported a weirdo to the Seattle Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit. A man had threatened them, using his Doberman as a weapon. He told them that he would command “Duke” to bite them if they didn’t get into his 1967 Mustang. Those who obeyed him were raped, and then subjected to a bizarre lecture. The rapist warned them that they were going to hell if they didn’t change their ways.

Those reports sounded as if a kinky-sadistic-religious psycho was out there preying on any woman he could find alone and either force or entice into his vehicle.

It was too early in a killing spree to look at the total number of murdered women throughout 1982 and see them as unknown and interchangeable entities who could very well be Green River victims. Many of the photos that accompanied the news coverage of the girls who were dead or missing were mug shots from prostitution arrests. There could have been many different killers. The victims all looked tired and sad and a little defiant, but more resolved to the life they were caught in. Some of their faces were tearstained, and they all looked years older than they really were. Those mug shots instantly separated them from the college girls and young women who lived in dorms or nice apartments in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods—Bundy’s classic victims of eight years earlier.

The five victims whose bodies had floated in the heedless Green River were lumped together because of where they had been found, but they weren’t really that much like one another, even though it was easy to infer that they had all met the same killing machine of a man.

Amina Agisheff, thirty-seven, was one of the first names on the extended Green River list even though she didn’t fit into any of the predictable categories. She was twice as old as many of the dead girls, she was not a prostitute, she didn’t hitchhike, she was a Russian immigrant, and she had a stable loving family, a loving boyfriend, and young children. She was a hard worker who couldn’t afford a car.

On July 7, 1982, Amina left her mother’s apartment after a visit and was waiting for a bus on Fourth Avenue in downtown Seattle. And she simply vanished, leaving her family to agonize over where she might be. When her picture appeared in the news alongside other presumed Green River victims, Amina always looked out of place. Perhaps she was added to the grim roster because she disappeared a week before Wendy Coffield’s body was found.

5

FOR THE GREEN RIVER Task Force, it was akin to playing a game with no rules. There may have been many victims already, or was it possible that there were only five? There was no telling how many suspects they were looking for. With victims whose lives were peripatetic, moving from city to city or from one motel or apartment after another, it was difficult to know if they were truly missing. Many women on the streets lost touch with their families, who were spread out across America. In such cases, they might not be reported as missing until they hadn’t called home for two Christmases in a row or for Mother’s Day. They might be dead, but no one knew that except their killers.

When college girls vanish, their roommates or housemothers or families have great difficulty waiting the forty-eight hours required to make an adult “Missing” report. When runaways and kids on the street disappear, all too often there is no one to sound the alarm that they are gone.

For the initial Green River Task Force, it seemed more likely that the women found in the river were the only victims, that it was over, and the man who murdered them had either moved on or stopped killing. Now, looking at it with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, the pattern of multiple murder is crystal clear.

But it most definitely was not in the months that passed from August 1982 to November 1983. Validating disappearances and identifying true victims was as difficult as finding beads from a broken necklace, dozens of them rolling on the floor and becoming lost in crevices and under desks and cabinets. Who could ever know how many there had already been, or how many were yet to be found and restrung into a strand that connected them all?

 

GISELLE LOVVORN was seventeen in the summer of 1982. She had no ties to the Seattle area, but earlier that year her boyfriend had persuaded her to leave California with him. Jake Baker,* known as “Jak-Bak,” was several years older than Giselle. He had street savvy and had pulled enough bunco ploys in California that a move was beneficial—even urgent—for him. He figured he should start over in new territory. He got a job driving a cab on the SeaTac Strip.

Giselle was the youngest child of an upper-middle-class family in the San Fernando Valley, where her father had his own insurance business. She was an unhappy girl who had begun to run away from home when she was only fourteen, and she dropped out of school in the tenth grade. She had been miserable in California, ever since the family moved there from New Orleans a few years earlier. Her father wondered if it was because the district they lived in bused students to inner-city schools. Out of place ethnically, looking so different from her classmates, Giselle had been beaten up and robbed of her lunch money. It seemed impossible for her to make friends or to fit into any group in school, and she was lonely.

Whatever the reason, she refused to go back to school. Her parents certainly weren’t happy to see her with Jak-Bak; he was too old for Giselle, and he wasn’t the kind of man who would encourage their daughter to finish her education. That was a tremendous loss because Giselle was very intelligent; she read constantly and her I.Q. had tested at 145, well above genius level on some tests. She was a voracious reader and her favorite book was Colleen McCullough’s The Thornbirds.

In her perfect longhand, Giselle wrote out McCullough’s description of a songbird who was born to seek out the thorn tree, find the sharpest, longest thorn to impale itself upon—so that it might sing one high perfect note as it died.

Many of Giselle’s thoughts were dark, and she appeared to find themes of death somehow romantic, even though she seemed sunny and upbeat on the surface. Like thousands upon thousands of other fans, she idolized Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead, and was proud to follow their concerts, considering herself a devout “Dead Head.”

Giselle also liked the Charlie Daniels Band, and she collected antique Jack Daniel’s whiskey labels. She wasn’t very different from other young women of the late seventies–early eighties in her wardrobe, wearing long peasant skirts whose hems came undone because they swept the rough ground; tight, long-sleeved cotton shirts, without a bra, of course; and little makeup.

But she was more rebellious than most. Her parents could only hope that she would outgrow the wanderer streak that had taken her around the country with only a backpack to hold all her possessions. Sometimes Jak-Bak went with her, but she often traveled alone, calling him or calling home for money orders when she was broke. She sometimes landed in places like Fargo, North Dakota, or Cut Bank, Montana, or Eugene, Oregon, as she followed the Grateful Dead concerts. Western Union records showed that Giselle was at a truck stop in West Fargo, North Dakota, on June 3, 1982, to pick up a fifty-dollar money order that Jak-Bak had sent her.