With reporters jotting down his words, Foster became more garrulous and confidential. He explained how he suffered from a rare kind of “nervous autonomic tic” that always showed up on lie detector tests even when he was telling the truth.

Foster said he had not been lucky romantically. He’d been married and divorced five times, but he said he hadn’t given up on finding love. He was thirty when he married for the first time, but it lasted only 121 days because his bride “just couldn’t stand domesticity and she just up and quietly disappeared.” He married the next year and that one lasted long enough for them to have two sons. Four years later, he divorced his second wife when she became clinically depressed and was admitted to a mental hospital. After moving back in with Melvyn and their sons, she subsequently died of an overdose of lithium.

“We had a very special thing going for seven years,” he commented. “I miss her every day.”

His third wife was a rebound affair and lasted less than six months. He said he’d divorced her when she slapped his two-year-old son. “That one ended on the spot,” he said firmly.

The fourth union was even shorter—only six weeks, another rebound. Foster had taken his boys to California by then, and he said he had his paramedic’s license. He met his fifth wife in Anaheim, and she was already pregnant when he met her.

His last wife had divorced him because she claimed he’d hurt her five-week-old baby deliberately. Foster explained what really happened. The baby had suddenly stopped breathing, and “being a trained medic, I picked her up to resuscitate her. When I grabbed her, my right hand was a little stronger than it should have been, and it inflicted six in-line fractures on her rib cage.”

Foster said that the pediatrician at a dependency hearing had testified in his favor, but the infant was taken away from both his wife and him. (The doctor, when contacted, disagreed, saying, “She was taken away because of some injuries that shouldn’t have happened to a baby that young. The injuries were never fully explained, and the whole situation at home was not good.”)

Between that loss and Foster’s work as a cabbie and friend to street people in Seattle, his last marriage had collapsed, too. The divorce was final in June 1982, but by that time he was already engaged to Kelly, a seventeen-year-old runaway from Port Angeles, Washington.

His cabdriver friends acknowledged that Foster liked young girls, and said the girls had used him. “They called him a ‘Sugar Daddy,’ ” one man said, “and he’d buy them meals or clothes or give them back rubs.” Kelly, now his ex-fiancée, explained that she broke up with Foster because he’d become obsessed with a fourteen-year-old girl. “He worshipped the ground she walked on.”

Foster admitted that his sex drive finally overcame his reservations with Kelly, but swore he had not touched any other teenagers. And he denied that he would ever hit or hurt a woman, although he didn’t back away from a fight with a man. “For many years, I have only harmed men in defending the helpless, or, with no reasonable alternative, myself, and with the aggressor on the ground, I would end the incident by walking away; murder is not in me to commit.”

Ending his press conference on a positive note, Melvyn Foster said he was corresponding with a pretty twenty-three-year-old bartender in West Virginia who was interested in moving to Washington State to marry him if they could raise the money for travel and a place of their own. “You get those daughters of a coal miner’s family and you’ve got somebody who will stick it out with you, so I think I’m going to go for it,” he said with a grin.

Despite his obvious enjoyment at being newsworthy, Melvyn Foster’s efforts to join the investigation had brought him a lot more attention than he expected, and it wasn’t positive attention. It would be a safe bet to believe he regretted ever coming forward to “help” in the first place.

He complained to the cameras that the task force members had made a terrible “mess” when they searched his house. “That was interesting to watch on TV,” Dick Kraske remembered, “because I personally instructed the crime scene specialists and everyone else there to put things back in order before we left. We even washed all of the coffee cups we had dusted—with negative results—and hung them back on the rack in the kitchen.”

As incensed as he claimed to be, Melvyn Foster always seemed to be there, a presence at the edge of the Green River probe, as if he couldn’t stay away. Green River detectives now placed him under surveillance for at least three weeks, monitoring all his movements twenty-four hours a day.

The officers who kept track of him noted that he met with another prominent figure in the investigation most evenings at the Ebb Tide restaurant in Kent, just a few hundred feet from the Green River, to share confidences and cocktails.

Barbara Kubik-Patten was a middle-aged housewife, mother, and self-styled psychic/private detective. She had inserted herself into the investigation even before Foster. Indeed, on the Sunday in August when investigators pulled three bodies from the Green River, Dick Kraske had looked up to see two Kent detectives approaching on either side of a woman. The woman, Kubik-Patten, had somehow heard of the body retrieval. She had prevailed upon the Kent investigators to take her to the river.

Convinced that she had had visions of murder that had come true, she would continue to insist that she could be vitally important to the Green River Task Force. Kubik-Patten would not have been particularly memorable except for the fact that she and Foster spent a lot of time together, and she kept appearing on both the SeaTac Strip and on the banks of the Green River.

Although she was not known in psychic circles in the Seattle area, Kubik-Patten insisted that she “saw” and “heard” things that ordinary people didn’t. She told Dave Reichert that she was quite sure she had picked up Opal Mills sometime during the summer while the teenager was hitchhiking.

Later, on July 14, something had drawn Kubik-Patten to the Green River. She said she had seen a small pale-colored car there, and heard screams. The name “Opal” or “Opel” had vibrated over and over in her head. Sometimes, Kubik-Patten said, she had chased after the mysterious car, and sometimes she recalled only that it had been parked near the river and then sped away, distancing itself from her so that she couldn’t catch up. She now believed devoutly that she must have been present when Opal Mills was being murdered.

It is a rare detective who gives much credence to psychic visions. All of their training teaches them to look for what can be proven and demonstrated in a court of law, something that can be seen, felt, touched, even smelled. Psychics tend to “see” landmarks like “mountains” and “trees” and “water,” and Washington State is rife with all three.

Barbara Kubik-Patten’s precognition seemed to be more precise, but her timing was questionable. Was she simply “remembering” something that was now fairly common knowledge after a media blitz on the Green River cases? Or had she actually been at the location where the bodies of Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Marcia Chapman had been found?

Kubik-Patten called Dave Reichert and Detective Fae Brooks every few days with new insights and predictions, making herself a constant thorn in their sides and actually hampering them from doing their work. She herself became supremely frustrated when she felt they weren’t taking her seriously, which, in all truth, they weren’t. She was a nervous, intrusive presence when they needed every minute they had to follow up real tips and possible witnesses. Worse, she was probably contaminating possible witnesses’ memories as she planted herself on the Strip and began to play detective herself.