A number of tips and referrals were impossible to say “yes” or “no” to in terms of their possible connection to the Green River Killer. In late January 1983, a man laying water pipes along a shallow ditch only a hundred yards from Northgate Hospital was removing some brush when he was horrified to see what appeared to be a human skeleton beneath the branches. The location was almost on the north Seattle boundary line, so it was handled by the Seattle Police Department.

The desiccated remains were of a small human. The King County Medical Examiner’s office removed the bones carefully, but an autopsy failed to reveal any cause of death. The body had no soft tissue left; the young female could have died from any number of causes.

The teeth, however, matched Linda Jane Rule’s, the blond girl who had been missing for four months after she left her motel room to walk to the Northgate Mall. Sergeant Bob Holter and Captain Mike Slessman of the Seattle Homicide Unit were fully aware of the Green River murders, but they could find no absolute link between them and Linda Rule. Lifestyle? Yes. Location? Not really. Most of the missing women had last been seen in the south county area, not in the north end. “Technically,” Holter said, “we’re not calling this a murder—we don’t have enough to go on for that—but the results are the same. She is dead, and we don’t know why or how.”

BY early March 1983, the dread that there was still someone out there on the highway grew. The women who fell into the endangered category counted the possible victims and had to fight back panic. Still, almost all the young women who worked the SeaTac Strip or along the dangerous blocks on Aurora Avenue North believed that they would be able to recognize the killer. He must surely be giving clues that the missing girls hadn’t picked up on. Each working girl had a picture in her mind about who she would not go with. Many of them worked on the buddy system with other prostitutes, saying “Remember who I’m with” as they got into cars. Some would not accept car dates, others wouldn’t go into a man’s motel room, or his house.

 

ALMA ANN SMITH was working the corner of S. 188th Street and the highway on March 3, 1983. The huge and expensive Red Lion Inn was located there, across the street from the airport. This was no “hot bed” motel; the Red Lion was one of the nicer places to stay in Seattle, with its richly carpeted corridors, hand carvings, and exterior elevators that echoed the Space Needle’s. There was a pricey gourmet restaurant on the Red Lion’s top floor. If the Green River Killer was scruffy-looking, he would be noticed immediately at the Red Lion and quickly hustled outside by hotel security.

Alma came from Walla Walla, Washington, a world away from Seattle. Brook Beiloh, her best friend in seventh grade, remembered her as an extremely generous girl who “didn’t have a malicious bone in her body.”

Brook recalled the childhood days they had shared. “Walla Walla was still untouched by crime twenty years ago. Kids played in the streets till dark. We rode our bikes to every corner of that small town without fear and without supervision. This was the place where a latchkey kid didn’t need a key because who locked their doors? After seventh grade, I didn’t see Alma very often. She would be in class one day, and then you wouldn’t see her again for three to six months. When she came back from wherever she went—or maybe ran away to—she always made an effort to contact me. We would hang out for a day or two, and then she’d be gone. I don’t know the story behind this behavior, although I asked her one time where she always took off to, and she simply replied, ‘Seattle.’ Alma was a couple of years older than me, but I still remember thinking how terrifying it would be to be alone in the city!”

Once, Alma sent Brook an eight-by-ten picture of herself, a studio shot, with a letter on the back. Alma’s hair was blonder than when she was in the seventh grade, but she still had great eyes with arching brows. “I don’t know where she got it, because Alma never had a lot, so this gesture touched me deeply,” Brook recalls. “I saw her last in December 1982, just three months before she was murdered.”

Alma had a lot of friends, and she and some of the other girls who plied their risky trade along the Strip agreed to try to protect each other. Alma and her roommate and best friend, Sheila,* were both looking for johns on March 3. Sheila left with a man first, returning to the bus stop about forty-five minutes later. Alma wasn’t there, and Sheila figured she’d found a trick.

“Anyone know where Alma went?” she called to young women nearby.

“She left with some guy in a blue pickup truck.”

“White or black?”

“White—just an average-looking guy. You know…”

Sheila grew concerned when an hour passed and Alma didn’t come back. She had a “hinky” feeling, but she couldn’t say why. She wished she had been there to get a license number or something. She waited nervously for Alma to come back.

Alma never did.

 

DELORES WILLIAMS was another girl who found the bus stop in front of the sumptuous motel a good place to meet wealthy johns, and to take shelter from the rain, too. Delores had a lovely smile, and she was tall and slender. She was only seventeen. The storms of March whipped and keened around the towering wings of the Red Lion, and the bus stop with its partial paneling was cold, but business was usually brisk.

Still, by March 8, Delores didn’t wait there any longer. Her friends thought maybe she’d found a better location.

BOTH DAVE REICHERT and Fae Brooks still felt that Melvyn Foster was a good suspect. It was hard for them to write him off because he had, it turned out, known some of the first six victims, however briefly. And he did fit into the part of the John Douglas profile about suspects who liked to hang around the investigation and savor their memories. Foster continued to brag that he’d be glad to punch the killer out if he ever ran across him, and claimed that the police were wasting time concentrating on him when they should be out looking for the real killer.

Dick Kraske could see that two detectives couldn’t possibly keep up with the overload, and he transferred four more investigators in to help: Elizabeth Druin, Ben Colwell, Pat Ferguson, and Larry Gross. Detective Rupe Lettich, who had been the head narcotics detective in King County for a long time, was right across the hall and he helped, too. But the twenty-five-person task force was no more. Morale was low and the public didn’t seem to care all that much about young prostitutes out on the SeaTac Strip. They weren’t their daughters.

But silently and stealthily, more of them were being trapped like rabbits in a snare.

Spring arrived with daffodils, tulips, cherry blossoms, and Scotch broom bursting as they always have from rain-sodden earth. Hopes, however, did not. The girls who had gone missing in the fall and winter apparently weren’t in Portland or Yakima or Spokane or any other city on “the circuit.”

 

SANDRA K. GABBERT was seventeen on April 17 when she strolled along the Strip near what appeared to be the most dangerous corner—Pac HiWay and S. 144th. The Church by the Side of the Road was three blocks away, the 7-Eleven was a block away, and the motels that catered to four-hour occupancy for only $13 and cheap weekly rates were clustered around that intersection. Although she’d been a star on the girls’ basketball team, Sand-e had dropped out of school because she was bored, and now she was living with her teenage boyfriend. They were barely able to afford motel rooms and fast food. Her mother, Nancy McIntyre, knew that Sand-e was selling herself to make enough money for that, but she couldn’t stop her. Sand-e’s street name was “Smurf,” and she had a kind of insouciant charm, as if she didn’t take herself all that seriously.