Jose, Richie, and Marie’s brother, James, started at the intersection where Richie had seen the pickup truck pull away. They inched east on 216th, down the long winding hill, and then back and forth along Military Road. They were looking for some sign of Marie, or the truck with the primer spot on the passenger door. They checked driveways and carports. There weren’t many houses on the west side of Military Road going north—only a new motel sandwiched in a narrow slice of land just off an I-5 Freeway ramp. But when they headed south, there were many modestly priced homes on both sides of the road.

On May 3, the trees were all leafed out and dogwood, cherry, and apple trees were blooming. After making several passes, they finally spotted a street sign on the right side of the road: S. 220th Place. Turning in, they found an almost hidden residential street, a cul-de-sac with eight or ten little ranch houses. In the driveway of a house near the north end of the street, they all saw it: an old pickup truck. They got close enough to look at the passenger door. It had a primer splotch on it.

They immediately called the Des Moines Police Department, and Bob Fox responded. He and another detective knocked on the door while Marie’s father, brother, and boyfriend watched. Fox was talking to someone, nodding, asking another question, and nodding again. Finally, the front door shut and the Des Moines detectives walked slowly down the walk.

“He says there’s no woman in there,” Fox told Jose Malvar. “Hasn’t been a woman in there.”

The man who said he was the owner had struck the police as straightforward enough, and he hadn’t been nervous, just curious about why the police were knocking on his door. Fox didn’t even know if his was the same truck Richie had seen, and he hadn’t pushed his questioning very hard. There was no probable cause to search the small house whose rear yard backed up to the bank that sloped to the freeway. The guy who lived there was friendly but firm when he said he lived there alone, had just bought the house, in fact.

Her boyfriend and relatives who were searching for Marie Malvar watched the house for a while, frustrated and anxious. Was Marie in there? Had she ever been? They fought back the urge to go up and pound on the door themselves, but, finally, they drove away. Still, they came back at odd times to check. It was the closest they could be to Marie, or at least they thought so. Where else could they look?

DETECTIVES were inclined to believe that none of the men who had driven battered pickup trucks was likely to be the killer they sought. With both Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s and Marie Malvar’s last sightings, the girls’ boyfriends were positive that the drivers had seen them watching. It didn’t make sense that a killer would be brazen enough to take that kind of chance. It was more likely that Kimi-Kai and Marie had met someone else after they got out of the trucks.

One murdered girl, who was found near Pac HiWay and S. 216th almost a year before and who had seemed to fit into the Green River victim profile turned out to be an unrelated victim. The Green River Killer wasn’t the only dangerous man trolling for victims in the Seattle area. Patricia Jo Crossman was working as a prostitute and, like the others, she was in her midteens when she died violently, her body tossed from a balcony into bushes. Thirty-year-old Thomas Armstrong III, who was arrested and prosecuted for that crime, tried to convince Judge Robert Dixon that Patty Jo’s death was related to the Green River murders, even attempting to link his ex-wife, Opie, to the killings. The ex-wife’s apartment house was burned down a month after Patty Jo’s murder.

It took two trials to convict him, but prosecutor Linda Walton argued that detectives had found absolutely no connection to the Green River cases. There was, however, overwhelming evidence that Armstrong had killed Patty Jo on April 8, 1982.

On April 8, 1983, Armstrong was sentenced to life in prison.

And the real Green River Killer still roamed free, taking more victims, most of whom simply disappeared from the motels and streets where it was normal for them to be around for a time and then be gone. Their friends assumed that they had simply moved on.

13

WITH THE KNOWLEDGE that we have today, the so-called Green River Killer, whoever he was, seemed to be in a homicidal frenzy, proceeding along the path that serial killers so often take. For them, murder is addictive, and it takes more and more of the “substance” to satisfy them, or to make them feel, as two infamous serial murderers have said, “normal.”

 

AS THE WEATHER grew warmer, his pace increased. Martina Theresa Authorlee, nineteen, was at the prize spot near the Red Lion on May 22, 1983, but not on May 23 or any day after. Born in West Germany where her father was in the army, Martina had moved back to the United States with her parents in 1968 to live on the sprawling Fort Lewis Army Base south of Tacoma. Her ambition was to have a service career, too, and she had joined the National Guard and left for six weeks of basic training in 1982. But she was given a medical discharge and never completed her time in South Carolina. After that, she seemed to lose direction. Without explaining to her parents what had happened, she moved to Hillsboro, Oregon, that summer, but she still called home twice a month.

Martina came home for Mother’s Day, 1983, and spent some time with her family. As far as they knew, she intended to go back to Oregon after her few days’ visit. She told them she had a job, but they didn’t know what she did. Nor did they know that she had been arrested for prostitution and served two days in jail in Seattle. They sensed she was troubled, but she was a girl who kept her thoughts to herself.

Assuming she was back in Oregon, they weren’t unduly worried until they heard nothing more from her, not even at Christmas.

 

CHERYL LEE WIMS, eighteen, vanished on May 23 from the central district in Seattle. It was the night before her birthday. She was a softly pretty girl with a shy look about her. Should she be on the list? Or was she too far away from the Strip? She had had some problems with drug use, according to her mother, Ruth Wims, a nurse, but she could not picture Cheryl involved in prostitution, even though she had become somewhat secretive. The worst problem her mother ever had with Cheryl was that she was missing too much school.

The only job her family knew about was as a busgirl in a downtown restaurant. There, her boss described Cheryl to detectives as “quiet, conservative, and conscientious.” Her name and Martina’s were added to the Green River Killer’s agenda.

Yvonne Antosh had come all the way from Vancouver, British Columbia, to the Pac HiWay Strip. She was nineteen, a most attractive young woman with very thick auburn hair that fell like scalloped curtains around her face. And she, too, disappeared from the highway. Someone recognized her on May 30, as she stood near S. 141st, but they never saw her after that.

There were so many of them that it seemed almost impossible that they hadn’t been seen with whoever was taking them away. The girls on the street were edgy, looking twice into cars at men who leaned forward to ask them if they were “dating.” They tried to look out for each other, too. They went off alone, but their friends attempted to remember the cars or something about the johns they left with.

A number of the suspected victims seemed to disappear in bunches, several of them within a very short time period from the same spots on the highway. It was almost as if he were a fisherman who discovered a well-stocked location and returned again and again until he had “fished” that part of the lake dry.