He had allergies, too, and his nose was always running. If he wiped it on his sleeve, his parents told him that was filthy, but he didn’t always have a tissue.

They usually lived in nice enough houses, but they moved so often that he always felt unsettled. He never really got to know the other kids in his class at the Catholic elementary school. Sometimes he had fun playing, but he always felt kind of sad or maybe angry because it seemed he had so many things wrong with him. He remembered that when he was seven or eight, he was always getting lost. That was mostly when they lived in Utah. He didn’t know why but he couldn’t seem to orient himself when he wandered too far away from home—and had trouble finding his way back.

One time, he had a “big, huge side ache,” and he literally thought he was going to die. There was no one around where he was, and his side hurt so bad that he just had to lie down and rest for at least two hours. And when he was finally able to walk home, he was in trouble for being so late, and no one would listen to him when he tried to tell them that his belly hurt him so much he couldn’t move.

He often thought that he was going to die of something before he was twenty-one. Everything he did turned out bad: his school-work, his bed-wetting. He didn’t fit in anywhere, not even in his own family. He suspected that his parents had brought the wrong kid home from the hospital because he wasn’t like his brothers. If he didn’t come home at all, he figured nobody would miss him much.

Somewhere around this time they moved up to Pocatello, Idaho, but things weren’t any better. He wasn’t very big and bullies picked on him. There was one boy at his new school named Dennis who used to wait for him in an alley after school and beat him up. When he came home with his clothes torn, his nose bloodied, and his face scratched, his father got angry. Not at Dennis, at him.

“If you come home one more time beat up,” his father warned, “I’ll beat your ass myself.”

Then his father softened a little and taught him how to fight. He showed him how to put his hands up and to jab and punch, so he didn’t just have to stand there and let Dennis hit him.

“I got Dennis down on the ground once,” he said, “and held his arms, and I could tell my dad was watching and he was smiling.” He and Dennis were both crying by then, but his father seemed pleased as he walked back to his gas station a block away.

But, somehow, he was still angry. He would think about things he could do to other people to hurt them. He was a pretty good fighter now. He learned he could hold his opponents on the ground and keep them from moving if he put his feet or his knees on their shoulders.

Then he flunked school and was held back. That made him so mad that he pegged rocks at the school’s windows and smashed a lot of them.

More and more, he fantasized about violence. It had been so satisfying to beat up Dennis and to hear the school windows shattering, and to get away with it.

He started setting fires when he was about eight—not houses, but garages and outbuildings. He found some newspapers stacked in a garage a few houses away from their house on Day Street, and he was playing with matches and set the fire. He heard the fire engines coming as he hid in his basement at home. He didn’t come out for a long time, not until after dark. Nobody knew he did it.

When he was older, he was playing with matches in a dry field at Long Lake where his grandfather owned some property. He lit the grass, and then tried to stomp it out, but it quickly got away from him. He didn’t mean to do it, but fire always fascinated him.

That boy grew up in the fifties, seeming to be such a nonentity that no one beyond his small circle would ever know his name. It would be decades before his entire story was told through interrogations and interviews and a full-scale investigation the like of which had never been seen before. His every secret thought would be exposed, studied; each facet turned and held up to the light of day so that the mundane became horrendous, the salacious channeled to the deep perversion that it was.

12

THREE DECADES LATER in Seattle, 1983 lay just ahead. Few were sad to see the old year end. It had been a terrible time for a lot of people, but an exceptionally newsworthy era. In January 1982, Wayne Williams had been convicted of killing two of twenty-eight murdered black children in Atlanta. Claus von Bülow was found guilty in March of the attempted murder of his wife, heiress Sunny von Bülow, who went into a permanent vegetative state after he allegedly injected her with an overdose of insulin. (His conviction was later overturned.) Comedian John Belushi died of a combination of speed and heroin that same month. In happier news, Princess Diana gave birth to her first son, William, in June. But Ingrid Bergman died of cancer in August, and Princess Grace of Monaco drove off a cliff in September, suffering fatal injuries. In October, Johnson & Johnson took Tylenol off the market after eight people were fatally poisoned by strychnine-laced capsules. Pierce Brooks had flown to Chicago to try to help in that investigation. The Excedrin poisoning case was still open in Kent, although it didn’t get much national media play.

It got a lot more, however, than the Green River Killer cases, which were virtually unknown beyond Washington and Oregon. They had gripped Northwest residents and captivated the regional media, but nothing seemed to be happening in terms of an arrest or charges that would lead to a trial—or trials.

FRESH AIR, views of Elliott Bay, and even windows had never been perks for detectives in the King County Sheriff’s Office. Their offices were located on the first floor of the King County Courthouse, an antique building with marble hallways and a foundation so shaky that structural engineers warned that a substantial earthquake could bring it tumbling down. Major Crime Unit investigators’ desks filled one big room and the overflow was squeezed into small side rooms that held only three supervising officers. Command officers had offices, but they were tiny and had no windows either. Rooms where suspects were questioned were cramped.

Now, the Green River Task Force met in the same hidden space in the King County Courthouse where the “Ted” task force had worked back in the midseventies. Its narrow war room was across the hall from the Narcotics Unit, both half a floor up the back stairs at Floor 1-A. Two detectives could barely stand side by side with their arms outstretched without bumping into the walls. About the only thing 1-A had going for it was that it was private; no outsider could approach it without being stopped.

Maps and charts and victims’ photographs were tacked on the walls. Stacks of paper piled up, waiting to be sorted. The phones rang constantly. It was a “boiler room” in every sense of the term.

Fae Brooks and Dave Reichert were fielding most of the calls that were coming in. Reichert still looked as if he were in his early twenties; he grew a small mustache that made him look only slightly older. Most people close to the sheriff’s office still called him Davy, because it fit him.

Fae Brooks had made her bones in the sex crimes unit. She was a slender, classy black woman with a café au lait complexion. Intelligent and soft-spoken, she wore the big spectacles that were popular in the early eighties.

Some of the phone calls they answered were from anxious families or boyfriends of young women who hadn’t been heard from. More were from tipsters who were sure their information was vital. There were dozens and dozens of calls, and trying to respond to them all and even hope to follow up was like putting one finger in a dike that threatened to burst at any moment.