Locals didn’t know that the Three Bears Motel was a hot bed motel; it looked cozy from the outside. So did the New West Motel, which was next door to a long-term care facility. In the early eighties, this section of the old highway wasn’t considered sleazy. My family had eaten dinner at the Blockhouse Restaurant a few blocks south to celebrate birthdays, holidays, graduations, and sometimes after somber funerals and memorial services.

Even though I was a true-crime writer, I didn’t think of this section of Pac HiWay as part of the Strip; the dangerous part was supposed to be several miles north, near the airport. Ironically, S. 216th was the intersection where I always felt safe after I’d driven up the dark, winding road from the Kent Valley floor and the Green River.

But I was misinformed. I had no idea how many of the missing girls lay dead within a few blocks of that intersection. Nor did anyone else.

ROSE JOHNSON* was, arguably, one of the more beautiful of the dozens of girls who vanished during the Green River Killer’s peak killing swath from 1982 to 1984. In many ways, her life before she landed on the streets was similar to her sacrificed sisters; in some ways it was far worse.

Rose grew up in the south end, dropped out of school before graduating, and was allegedly the target of incest by several male members of her family. Her mother, a woman of strong opinions who was angry at life, angry at her, and angry at her own circumstances, blamed her daughter for the breakup of her marriage. Rather than taking Rose’s side when she came to her and said her father was molesting her, her mother saw her, instead, as a rival. She accused the teenager of deliberately trying to seduce him, and sided with her husband.

Enraged, he made life hell for his daughter. She had no privacy; he took her bedroom door off the hinges. She had to dress in her closet or behind a blanket. She never knew when someone would come in. When her window was broken in the coldest part of the winter, her father refused to fix it, and she was freezing, despite the cardboard she wedged into the empty frame. He padlocked the cupboards and the refrigerator so she couldn’t find anything to eat at home. It was up to Rose to survive any way she could.

The only thing she had to sell was herself. She bought an old beater of a car with some of the first money she made; if she couldn’t make enough to pay for a motel room, she had the car to sleep in. It wasn’t that bad in the summer months.

Rose was afraid of her mother, more because of the venom she seemed to exude than for any physical punishment the older woman administered. Even when her father finally moved out, Rose didn’t go home. It was still dangerous for her there.

“The first time I met Rose’s mom,” one of her close friends recalled, “it was in the Fred Meyer store in Burien. She walked up behind Rose real quietly, and she scared her. They had a few words that weren’t very nice. When the woman walked away, I asked Rose who in the world that woman was. She said it was her mom. I couldn’t believe it. She was so mean to Rose. I could see that Rose didn’t mean anything to her.”

Rose sometimes parked her car in the lot at the Red Lion Motel at 188th and Pac HiWay, but more often she left it in a little weed-filled lot next to Don the Barber’s at 142nd and the highway. Don recognized her because she was there often. As he cut hair, his window looked directly over to the lot, and he saw Rose meet johns there dozens of times. She would lock her car and leave with different men, and then come back later. Don recalled that he noticed her because she was very pretty and very young, and unlike most of the girls who strolled the Strip, he never saw her with a male protector.

“I don’t know how long she’d been parking there,” Don said, “but one day, she just wasn’t there. Or the next. Or any day. She never came back. When I saw her picture in the paper later, I realized why she wasn’t there any longer. She was dead. He got her, too.”

What Don did not know was something that would shock him more than Rose’s disappearance. The man who killed her had sat in his barber chair regularly for decades, chatting amiably and laughing at Don’s jokes.

Like many of the Green River Killer’s victims, Rose sniffed cocaine when she could afford it. It blurred the harsh edges of her life and gave her a false sense that things were looking up. Early on the day she vanished, she had called a friend and arranged to buy some cocaine.

“When she never showed up, I didn’t think too much about it,” her friend said. “ ’Cause that’s how people like that are. But a few days later a friend of ours called and asked me if I’d seen Rose, and I told her I’d talked to her just a few days earlier. We spread the word and tried to find her, but none of us ever saw her again.”

Her family didn’t report her missing for a long time. When they did, they were vociferous about their anger with the task force.

14

THE BOY GREW OLDER but he was still behind in school and in social interaction. His parents had moved yet again—from Idaho to Seattle—and he had to start all over trying to make friends. He was about thirteen now and he still wet the bed most nights. His mother was out of patience. Now that he was on the verge of puberty, he was both angered and sexually excited when she washed urine from his genitals. She had so much control over him. She was tougher in her way than his father was. She kind of bossed his father around, too, and she was the one who got things done. He and his brothers called her “the warden.”

She went off to her job dressed for success, wearing nice clothes and jewelry and with her face made up perfectly. She was very popular and competent in her job. When he was smaller, back in Idaho, she had been kind to him, and they worked on puzzles together. Even though she was gone all day working in their father’s gas station, he sort of remembered that she had come home to cook. It didn’t matter; they weren’t hungry, and they had plenty of things to do. And she had tried to help him with reading. “I had a really hard time reading.”

But his mother wanted things really clean and scrubbed away at his genitals after he wet the bed. Once aware that hands touching his penis felt good, he thought about sex quite a bit. It wasn’t a subject that was mentioned or explained in his home and so he didn’t ask questions about whether what he felt was normal or not. From something his mother had said, he did know that masturbation was one of the worst sins of all. Worse than raping someone.

Two girls about his age lived right next door to their Seattle house. They had a pool and he was able to watch them surreptitiously as they splashed around in their bathing suits. They didn’t know he was watching, so he was often invited over to join them.

He became a window-peeper, or, rather, he tried to see through blinds. He had a crush on one of the neighbor girls, whom he termed “an older lady,” although she was really only seventeen. He hung out with her younger brothers and was at her house a couple of times a week, watching television.

By this time, he often got erections, and he almost always did when he was in her living room. That summer, she watched the TV set from an easy chair, but he sat on the floor and managed to slyly pull aside his shorts so that she could see his erect penis if she happened to glance his way. He thought she’d be impressed and want to have sex with him, but she never gave any sign she’d seen him.

Although she didn’t appear to notice that he was exposing himself, he fantasized about talking to her and asking her to have sex with him. He was fourteen, but he was still in the sixth grade, taller than almost everyone else in his class because he’d been held back.