Maybe Sand-e didn’t remember where the other girls had vanished, or maybe she didn’t care. She had the untested confidence common to the young; she was indestructible.

Nancy had been on her own with Sand-e since her divorce when her little girl was two. Only forty-one, Nancy had worked as a bar-maid for years and life was tough. Now she made minimum wage as a maintenance worker for the Seattle Parks Department. She didn’t even try to debate the moral issues of prostitution with Sand-e; she was worried about her daughter’s survival. “I said, ‘Sand-e, you could get yourself killed doing this,’ and she said, ‘Oh Mom, I’m not going to get killed.’ She didn’t want to hear about it or talk about it because she knew I was so scared. She could turn one trick, take half an hour, and make as much as she made when she worked for Kentucky Fried Chicken for two weeks. Now, you try to show someone the logic of getting a legitimate job,” Nancy said with a sigh. “I realized if I tried to force her to stop, I’d have alienated her from me. And I’d go through anything before that—even prostitution.”

The last time Nancy saw Sand-e, they ate at a Mexican restaurant, and Sand-e talked about her plans to go traveling to San Francisco and Hollywood. “I put my arms around her,” Nancy recalled as tears coursed, unbidden, from her eyes. “I said, ‘I love you, baby. Please be careful.’ She said, ‘I love you, too. I am careful.’ I watched her walk along the front steps, and I knew I wasn’t going to see her for a long, long time.”

Four days later, Sand-e was gone.

 

WITHIN only a few hours, Kimi-Kai Pitsor, who was sixteen, got into an old green pickup truck on 4th and Blanchard in downtown Seattle. By taking the I-5 Freeway, it was possible to travel the fourteen miles between the two locations in under half an hour, unless someone tried to do it during rush hour when traffic backups were the norm.

Could the same man have taken both teenagers in one night? Bundy had taken two victims on one Sunday afternoon eight years earlier. But those young women were sunbathing at the same park. Was it imaginable that this man was trying to break some dark record?

Kimi-Kai and Sand-e looked somewhat alike, youngish for their age, with dark hair and bangs. Sand-e had been alone just before she disappeared, although she and her boyfriend had walked together to the 7-Eleven only a few minutes before. She had left him behind as she crossed Pac HiWay. And Kimi-Kai was walking with her boyfriend/protector when she signaled a man in a truck to turn around the corner so she could get into his vehicle without being seen.

Kimi-Kai, whose street name was “Melinda” had tried working down in Portland for a short time, but the girls there pegged her as “very innocent and naive.” With her boyfriend, she had headed for Seattle, along with several other young women who’d been in Portland, because the word was you could make more money there. But the word was wrong; Portland wasn’t where it was happening. So they returned to Seattle.

For the second time, detectives had the description of a vehicle (beyond the small white car Barbara Kubik-Patten said she saw by the Green River). Again, it was a pickup truck. Kimi-Kai’s boyfriend described an older green truck with a camper on the back and primer paint on the passenger door. He thought it was either a Ford or a Dodge.

Halfway into April 1983, and two more teenagers had failed to come back or to call anyone they knew. The trucks’ descriptions were printed in Seattle papers, but the investigators weren’t too hopeful that it would help. There were a lot of older trucks, some of them green, some blue, some brown and tan, and a whole lot of them with primer spots.

FOR SOME REASON murder victims and most serial killers are often referred to in the media by their first, middle, and last names. Is it, perhaps, to give the victims dignity? As for the killers, is it to distinguish them from other men with similar names? Or does it, unfortunately, imbue them with extra infamy? Theodore Robert Bundy, Coral Eugene Watts, Jerome Henry Brudos, Harvey Louis Carignan, John Wayne Gacy.

Hearing the full names of the hapless teenagers who encountered the Green River Killer could not help but evoke thoughts of how short a time had passed since they were tiny babies, whose parents lovingly picked out enchanting names, with carefully chosen middle names, in the hope that their daughters’ lives would unfold like flowers. Even parents whose own lives had been bruised with disappointment hoped for a better future for their children.

Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s mother, Joyce, loved her baby’s name so much that she embroidered it on her sheets and blankets. In Hawaiian, it meant “golden sea at dawn.”

Talking with veteran Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Mike Barber, Joyce Pitsor described Kimi-Kai as a petite girl who loved unicorns and anything purple. Like many girls her age, she hit a defiant streak almost at the very moment she entered puberty. She fell in love with a boy and wanted to be with him more than her mother thought prudent. Railing against curfews and rules, Kimi left home in February 1983 to move in with her boyfriend, but she called her mother every week.

“Kimi was very adventurous,” Joyce remembered. “She wasn’t afraid. She wanted to see how life worked and never took anyone’s word for anything. She had to see for herself. I remember telling her, ‘Be a little girl for a while. Enjoy yourself. You have all the time to be a grown-up with all those problems.’ But she wanted to be an adult so bad.”

And now, Kimi-Kai was gone. If anyone had ever viewed her as tough, her mom knew better. “She could put on the most bravado routine, especially if she was terrified. What it really was was bordering on hysteria.” Joyce Pitsor had seen that when she rushed down to juvenile court to stand by Kimi-Kai when she was in trouble.

Now, waiting for word was torturous for her mother, who had already lost two of her children—one at birth and one as an infant. She was a woman who loved kids; she had adopted three biracial children because she did care so much. But she hadn’t been able to convince her own daughter to wait just a few years before she plunged into the adult world.

And within only two months of “freedom,” Kimi-Kai was gone, too.

THE NEW WEST MOTEL was on the Des Moines end of Pac HiWay across 216th to the north of the Three Bears, with a convenience store between them.

 

SOMETIME in the third week of April, Gail Lynn Mathews, twenty-four, registered at the New West. Gail was an exotic-looking woman with luxuriant black hair. Her most distinctive feature was her extremely full, lush mouth. She was living with a thirty-four-year-old man from Texas named Curt, whom she’d met at Trudy’s Tavern near the airport in 1982. At that time, she’d had a little apartment across from Trudy’s, but she lost it when she couldn’t make the rent in February 1983. For weeks after that, Gail lived a week or two at a time with friends of friends of friends.

Except that she was older than most of the Green River victims, Gail Mathews’s lifestyle was similar to theirs. She had been married, but she was either divorced or separated by the spring of 1983, and she was down on her luck.

Neither Gail nor Curt had much money or permanent jobs; they drifted while he gambled in card rooms and she nursed a beer in the bar, waiting to see if he’d win enough for a meal and motel. Curt’s extensive vocabulary reflected his intelligence and education, but either drugs or alcohol had sidetracked him. His regular haunts were the White Shutters, Trudy’s, and the Midway Tavern. Now and then, Gail contributed money to the kitty. She never told Curt where she got it, and he never asked. Their lives had become a day-to-day existence. They had no car and no permanent residence.