She was heading toward that address on 30th Avenue South to meet the company owner: “Carl Johnson.” He had sounded like a nice man on the phone, and had been encouraging about her chances of being hired.

But Geri Slough never returned to her apartment, and she didn’t call her friends to report on her interview. Her car turned up the next day in the Park-and-Ride lot just a block off the south end of the SeaTac Strip in Des Moines. Her purse and some of her bloody clothing were discovered in South Pierce County—almost on the Thurston County line. This location was some forty miles from where her car was abandoned, but in an almost straight line down the Pacific Highway.

Three days later, on October 14, a fisherman found Geri Slough’s body floating in Alder Lake. She had been shot in the head. Geri Slough had absolutely no connection to prostitution, and the manner of her murder was different from the strangled Green River victims, but her age matched and the location of her disappearance matched.

Kent detectives tracked down the address in the “Help Wanted” ad and found the Realtor who had rented the office space to the Comp Tec owner. Carl Johnson had leased this tiny office, but the phone he used was in a nearby phone booth. In the office, the investigators discovered a large section of carpet that was saturated with dried blood. The crime lab tested it and found it was Type A. Geri Slough had Type A blood.

That was all they could prove at the time. DNA identification lay in the future, and Type A is one of the most common blood types.

But the man who claimed to be “Carl Johnson” had come to the attention of police in another jurisdiction even before Geri Slough’s body surfaced. In reality, he was Charles Raymond Schickler, thirty-nine. A few days after Geri Slough disappeared, he was arrested by Kitsap County deputies in connection with an auto theft and break-in.

The car, a 1979 Grand Prix, was being checked by Washington State Patrol troopers after he appeared to know a great deal about the disappearance of Geri Slough.

It had apparently all been an elaborate plot to lure young women to Schickler. There was no Comp Tec. Although Schickler had no history of violence, he had been arrested for mail fraud. A dozen years earlier, he had used another alias to place an ad in a coin collectors’ magazine offering rare coins for sale. According to court records, he collected $6,000 but never delivered any coins.

Charles Schickler had long suffered from manic-depression, soaring from ebullient plans to bleak depression. Once, when he was in the manic phase of his disease, he had leased a huge space and installed fourteen phones for a business that was only in his head.

But Schickler, a former mental patient, would never answer questions about Geri Slough or anything else. Using a sheet, he hung himself in his cell in the county jail, without ever explaining what had happened after Geri Slough arrived at his “office.”

Geri Slough’s murder and the Green River murders shared headlines on western Washington newspapers for a few weeks, and then the Slough case disappeared.

But the Green River headlines continued.

Any time a murder is still unsolved within forty-eight hours of its discovery, the chances that it will be solved diminish in direct proportion to the time that passes. Now, the term serial murder was being used to refer to the Green River Killer, whoever he was.

With the press clamoring for more details, Dick Kraske gave them something—information that was already a rumor on the street. He said publicly that all six known “river” victims had died of “asphyxiation,” although he would not say whether it was by strangulation or suffocation, and turned away more questions by being somewhat inscrutable, “There are different ways of strangling people,” he said.

How many victims were there, really? There was no way of telling. If disappearances weren’t reported, no one would know to look for them. And almost all the girls who worked on the street had several names. They had a real name, and sometimes more than one real last name because a lot of them had come from broken homes with a series of stepfathers, and then they had more exotic-sounding street names.

In retrospect, there were far more missing women than anyone knew. Despite the reasons they chose not to live at home, many young working girls kept in close touch with their mothers or their sisters, calling at least once a week to allay their relatives’ fear, and as a kind of lifeline for themselves. But others flew free, far away from home and family.

With the holidays ahead, some families were bound to realize that a daughter hadn’t come home or even called. The detectives wondered if the killer was enjoying Thanksgiving and Christmas with friends or family, sitting down to turkey dinners and opening presents with a clear-eyed smile hiding what lay beneath his mask. Was he a wealthy businessman or an airline pilot who lived far away from the darkened, rain-puddled streets of the Pacific Highway? Was he even, as the predominant rumor among the lay public now said, a police officer himself?

I heard that rumor a hundred times. The killer was a rogue cop, someone the women knew—and either trusted or feared.

10

ALONG WITH FELLOW F.B.I. special agents Robert Ressler and Roy Hazelwood assigned to the Behavioral Science Unit, John Douglas was among the first to agree with Pierce Brooks that there was, indeed, a category of murderers who fit into a serial pattern. Someone taking victims one after another after another after another. There had to be a differentiation between mass murderers, spree killers, and serial killers. The early 1980s brought together the Green River Killer saga and the forensic psychology experts who understood the inner workings of aberrant and destructive personalities.

The B.S.U. had received accolades for its agents’ ability to formulate profiles of killers. They were no more blessed with psychic ability than most working detectives, but they had had the opportunity to interview any number of killers, evaluate their answers, compare them to known truths, and study the affect of their subjects. From there, they connected the psychological dots.

Their profiles were most useful in cases where police agencies around the United States needed second opinions. If they were already weighing the likelihood that one suspect among two or more was the guilty one, profiling often worked. The B.S.U. agents could say, “We think it’s this one.” It was more difficult for them to describe phantom killers from scratch; tests with multiple choice answers are easier than open-ended tests. And the Green River Killer was still a phantom.

In the first six months of the Green River Task Force, there were a number of suspects: Melvyn Foster, Max Tackley, John Norris Hanks, and possibly even Charles Schickler. John Douglas now used his experience and the information supplied to him by the Green River Task Force investigators to draw a profile.

Douglas began with his take on the victimology of the six known dead women. He deduced that all of them were either prostitutes or “street people.” Their ages and race hadn’t seemed to matter to the killer. It had been Douglas’s experience that even the savviest street people could be tricked or fooled.

He felt the lay public’s belief that the killer was a cop or someone impersonating a cop could be on target. Douglas said this was a common device used to reassure or intimidate potential victims. A badge or fake uniform could help someone accomplish his first goal—control over the girls on the street, whose lifestyle made them vulnerable. Calling them “victims of opportunity,” he said they were easy to approach; they often initiated conversation with potential johns.