Dick Kraske noted that there was a positive side to the investigation, as frustrating as it was. Police and those involved in prostitution are not really natural enemies, but they view each other warily. “Usually, our people are out there trying to arrest them,” Kraske commented. “The women have their own communication system, and that’s where a lot of our information is coming from. We have been getting more help—quite a bit more—from the prostitutes than from the pimps. Some of them are very credible, and they’re very concerned.

“They talk to each other. ‘That guy is kinky. That one is weird. I saw a gun in the pocket of the guy’s car. Stay away from him.’ They know and recognize the weirdos.”

Now the prostitutes were running scared, and as widely diverse as their mutual goals were, the frightened women and the frustrated cops were cooperating with one another.

There were a lot of weirdos out there. Some of the earliest theories speculated that it might be significant that the SeaTac International Airport was right in the middle of the “kill zone.” Could the killer be someone who flew in and out of Seattle? Perhaps a businessman—or even a pilot. Exploring that premise, Kraske said that his task force had issued bulletins asking for information about prostitutes who might have been murdered near other major airports in the country. If a frequent flyer was killing girls in Seattle, wouldn’t it make sense that he was doing the same thing near other airports?

It was a good idea, but Kraske said, “We didn’t get anything back on that at all. So we still feel it is probably someone in this state.”

Officially, there were still only six victims.

AS SEPTEMBER turned into October, there was an obvious decline in the number of young women strolling the Pacific Highway. A lot of them were frightened, particularly when their network said that there were more missing girls than the police were talking about. It wasn’t just the Green River, which seemed distant from the SeaTac Strip to many of the girls; Giselle Lovvorn had been found murdered only a block or so off the Strip.

 

AND THEN acquaintances of two more teenagers realized that they hadn’t seen the girls in their usual haunts for quite a while. One was sixteen-year-old, five-feet-seven, 125-pound Terry Rene Milligan. She had been living with her boyfriend in a motel on Pacific Highway near S. 144th Street. He reported her missing and then promptly disappeared before detectives could ask him questions. The motel manager where Terry lived said the last time she’d seen her she was arguing with another girl, allegedly over a pimp, but the witness couldn’t describe the man or the other girl. Four of the dead and missing women were white, and four, including Terry, were black.

Terry shouldn’t have been out on the highway; she’d had so much going for her. She had been a brilliant student, and had dreams of going to Yale and studying computer science. She’d been active in her church, too, but when she became pregnant while she was still in middle school, her dreams got sidetracked. She adored her baby boy, but she dropped out of school and never went back.

Pierce Brooks had listed characteristics he deduced about serial killers as he urged police all over America to recognize the danger. One of his findings was that serial killers murdered intraracially—that is, whites killed whites, and blacks killed blacks. There weren’t enough Asian or Indian serial killers to gather statistics. Oddly, the Green River Killer didn’t seem to have any preference about the race of his victims. No one knew yet what race he was, but his preferred victims so far were young, vulnerable women he apparently encountered on the highway. He hadn’t broken into homes to rape or murder women in the SeaTac area.

But he had been more active in a shorter time in taking victims than any killer in the Northwest to date, including Bundy. The investigators learned that another girl had vanished only one day before Terry Milligan went missing. Kase Ann Lee, who happened to be white, was gone. She was sixteen, too, but the only picture available of her made her look thirty-five. Kase had once lived in the same motel as Terry Milligan, but that might be only a tenuous connection. Certain hotels and motels clustered around the airport were temporary homes to many young prostitutes.

Kase’s husband told police she was gone from the $300-a-month apartment they shared at S. 30th and 208th South. Both Terry’s and Kase’s addresses were right in the circle where the Green River Killer prowled.

 

KASE LEE was a pretty little thing, although her eyes looked old and tired in the photograph the task force had. She had strawberry blond hair and blue eyes, and weighed only 105 pounds. Even as defenseless as she was, somebody had been mis-treating her. Members of her loosely knit circle of friends told detectives that she often had cuts and bruises on her face as if she had been badly beaten. She wouldn’t tell them who had done this to her.

Two weeks earlier, police had been called to the motel where she lived in response to a fight, which did not involve Kase, and that alarmed many of the residents, most of whom avoided direct contact with law enforcement whenever possible. The task force detectives got all the information they could in their first contact, knowing that most of the witnesses would have moved on when they came back. They were right; strangers occupied the motel rooms when they returned.

Both Kase’s husband and Terry’s boyfriend were quickly eliminated as viable suspects. It could have been anyone the teenagers had met along the SeaTac Strip, some faceless wraith who killed them and then disappeared into the fog.

Since Mary Bridget Meehan, Terry Milligan, and Kase Lee hadn’t been found, they were not officially listed as Green River victims. There was always the chance they were alive and well in some other city.

Their families could only hope that was true.

8

THE OFFICIAL GREEN RIVER toll remained at six, as investigators Dave Reichert and Bob LaMoria continued to seek out witnesses or suspects. One suspect, however, planted himself firmly in the focus of their attention. Far from avoiding detectives, an unemployed cabdriver named Melvyn Wayne Foster was anxious for the media to know that he was central to the Green River investigation. Foster, forty-three, had a rather bland face with a high-domed forehead, and he wore metal-rimmed glasses. He looked more like an accountant or a law clerk out of the thirties than a cabdriver. But he liked to present himself as a tough guy who wasn’t afraid of a fight.

And he knew the SeaTac Strip very well, just as Dick Kraske knew Foster very well. “I was a brand-new cop back in the early sixties,” Kraske remembered. “I worked in the I.D. Bureau in the old jail, and as ‘the new guy,’ I was assigned to fingerprint all the new prisoners at the mug location on C Deck. Mel was on the list that day, en route to the State Reformatory at Monroe for auto theft.”

Kraske forgot all about Mel Foster until September 9, 1982, when Foster strolled into the Criminal Investigation Division with an offer to provide information on some of the Green River victims.

“I assigned Reichert and LaMoria to talk with him while I checked Records to search for Mel’s name,” Kraske said. “I pulled up his fingerprint card, taken when he was nineteen years old, and my signature was on it.”

Melvyn Foster appeared to be consumed with interest in the missing and murdered girls. He even offered the detectives his psychological theories on what the killer might be thinking. When he was asked where he got his experience as a psychologist, he said he’d “taken a couple of courses in prison.”