Sometime between two and four in the afternoon on Sunday, September 26, Linda left the room she shared with her boyfriend at a small brick Aurora Avenue motel. She wore pin-striped blue jeans and a black nylon jacket. She walked north, headed for the Kmart, where she planned to shop for clothes. Linda’s street name was “Ziggy,” after the cigarette papers used to make marijuana joints. It never seemed to fit her; she was softer and more feminine than that.

Linda’s boyfriend wasn’t particularly upset when she didn’t come home that night. “I assumed she’d been arrested,” he told Seattle police detective Bob Holter. “It was daytime, and she wouldn’t have been ‘working’ on Aurora in the afternoon.”

Linda had a lamentably familiar background. She’d dropped out of junior high school, and she was a moderate drug user—marijuana and Ritalin—but she was happy the day she left the motel. She and her boyfriend, Bobby, twenty-four, were planning to get married and she hoped they could have a regular, “normal” life.

Bobby looked for Linda in all the places he figured she might be. She wasn’t in jail—she hadn’t been arrested for prostitution or for anything else—and none of her friends had seen her. He kept careful notes on his search for her, and made a missing persons report.

 

DENISE DARCEL BUSH, twenty-three, was from Portland originally, and she sometimes traveled to Seattle to work for a few weeks. Portland is 180 miles south of Seattle, less than a three-hour drive. Young prostitutes were a little frightened in Oregon, but they figured that the killer was striking only in Seattle.

In Portland, the street girls called their work area “The Camp.” They worked downtown between 3rd and 4th to the east and west, and Taylor and Yamhill to the north and south. Now that vagrants had taken over much of Burnside Street, most of the women rented motel-apartments by the week up on Broadway.

“All they had to their names,” a onetime prostitute recalled, “was a pack of cigarettes, the motel key, and some change. Their pimps would wait for them down in the Lotus Bar, and they got the real money. They had Jheri curls and Adidas outfits and real leather coats. A lot of the girls wanted to go to Seattle because they heard the money was better up there.

“I was older so I usually worked the hotel lounges. When a girl was gone for a while, I didn’t pay attention—because I figured they’d gone to Seattle or Alaska. Funny how we assumed they just went on with their lives when, in reality, they were missing or dead….”

Denise Darcel Bush had gone to Seattle in the fall of 1982. She had a “boyfriend,” but she was alone the last time anyone saw her on October 8. She was crossing the road on Pacific Highway South and S. 144th, a corner that was proving to be the epicenter of the ballooning number of cases. Like so many of the girls who were disappearing, Denise left in the middle of life. She was going on a short errand to a convenience store to buy cigarettes. In the past, Denise had suffered bouts of epileptic seizures, but they were controlled with medication. At some point, she’d had a medical procedure involving her brain and her skull had a small hole in the bony process there, but she rarely thought about it. Only people close to her knew about it.

Denise was seen on one side of the highway, but she never made it across, or, if she did, no one who knew her ever saw her after that.

So many young women were disappearing, yet it was impossible to verify that they were gone against their will.

 

SHAWNDA LEEA SUMMERS, eighteen, went missing on October 7 or October 8 from the very same intersection—either the same night as Denise or the next day. The date was fuzzy since no one reported Shawnda missing for almost a month. Alarms were not really sounded yet because it was so difficult to tell the missing from those who had taken to the road to find better turf.

And then Shirley Marie Sherrill seemed to have evaporated from her usual haunts, too. She was nineteen, a lovely looking girl with light brown hair and hazel eyes, who was five feet nine and weighed 140 pounds. Shirley sometimes worked The Camp in Portland, Oregon, but her home city was Seattle. And that was where one of her close friends and co-workers saw her just before she disappeared on October 18. They had lunch before they set out to work—Chinese food in Seattle’s International District. But they weren’t secretaries or lawyers, and their “work” was out on the street.

 

“THE LAST TIME I saw Shirley,” her friend remembered, “was in Chinatown. She was talking to two men in a car. She looked really nice that day, and I assumed that she was going to go with them, but then I got picked up. And I never saw her after that.”

On Christmas Eve, 1982, a young woman named Trina Hunter went missing from Portland. Trina’s cousin would recall that she never wanted to be on the streets, but older male step-relatives had forced her into it. “They kept her locked up in the attic—one of those where you had to put a ladder up to get out of,” the cousin said. “They beat her, and only let her down to go to work. She tried to go to the police but nobody ever believed her.”

The landslide of human loss was accelerating, but it continued to be sub rosa. The people the lost girls associated with didn’t particularly like or trust police and were reluctant to approach them with missing reports.

BACK IN KING COUNTY, Washington, dark-eyed Becky Marrero, twenty—Debra Estes’s good friend—had been gone from White Center, a district west of the SeaTac Strip, since December 2. Becky often left her year-old baby, Shaunté, with her mother, and she sometimes said that it would be better for the baby if her mother adopted Shaunté. On the day Becky left she turned back to her mother and said somewhat inscrutably, “I’m going to be gone for a long time, and where I’m going, I can’t take a baby.”

Her mother thought she was joking or lying, and besides, Becky didn’t pack a suitcase, but took only a small blue carry-on-type bag with an extra pair of slacks, a blouse, and her makeup. She asked her father for twenty dollars to pay for a room for one night, and he gave it to her.

Becky Marrero was planning on taking a bus, her usual mode of transportation. Her mother believed that she had gone out to make some money for Christmas, but she never came back. Detective Fae Brooks established that Becky had registered at the Western Six Motel through December 1, 1982. And, of course, someone had signed Debra Estes’s name in the guest log as being in the same room with Becky.

Even though there were reported sightings of Becky Marrero after that, none of them could be validated.

 

IT IS LIKELY that the last Washington State disappearance of 1982 occurred on December 28, when Colleen Renee Brockman vanished. Colleen was only fifteen, a rather plump and plain girl whose photographs show her in jumpers and turtleneck tops. In one, she is wearing braces and holding a stuffed doll.

Colleen lived with her father and brother near the Lake Washington Ship Canal in the north end of Seattle. She had run away a couple of times before, only to come back within a few days. This time, there was no question that she meant to go. No one was absolutely sure why she had left; she had a crush on some boy, and she may have wanted to be with him.