WHEN they worked Portland, Keli usually started on Union Avenue early in the evenings, and then moved to the downtown area around eleven PM. She was very self-assured and seemed older than she actually was. “She was at the top of the ladder of the girls on the street,” a woman who had worked in the Camp in the eighties remembered. “Keli wore this white rabbit-hair coat and I could never tell if she wore a wig or whether her hair was just bleached and she used lots of hair spray. She was really friendly with a girl named Pammy Avent, whose street name was ‘Annette.’ Keli had a lot of street names.”

My correspondent, who was a mature woman in a completely straight career when she contacted me, asked that her identity not be revealed as she looked back at the way the Camp was twenty years before. Of course, I assured her that it would not be.

“A lot of the girls were out there for the social aspect besides [being there] to make money—playing video games and visiting with each other at the Fun Center—but not Keli. She was focused on making money. She usually walked alone while the other girls walked in pairs. Keli had this strut and she stared into every car that passed her.”

The last time anyone who knew her remembered seeing Keli McGinness was at seven thirty PM on June 28, 1983, at the now-familiar corner of the Pac HiWay and S. 216th. That night she was wearing a tan short-sleeved sweater, blue jeans, a long camel-hair coat, and very high heels. The Three Bears Motel was on that corner, and the desk clerk’s register showed that she checked in at ten PM.

Keli’s boyfriend reported her missing the next day, but Des Moines police detective sergeant Bob Fox wasn’t convinced that she had met with foul play. He had seen too many adults and older teenagers leave of their own accord. He told a reporter, “There’s no law against a person saying, ‘I’ve had it. I’m leaving.’ I just don’t know, and I don’t think we will know, until we hear from her one way or another.”

Keli was so attractive that people who saw her remembered her, but like Marie and Gail and so many girls before her, nobody along the Strip saw her.

THERE WERE OTHER CASES that might or might not be connected to the series of disappearances in 1983, and the murdered victims in the last half of 1982, enough cases that it set investigators’ teeth on edge, wondering just who might be out there, always alert to vulnerable females.

On July 9, 1983, King County patrol officers took a report from an eighteen-year-old secretary who had been violently raped. She was a classic victim: a little intoxicated, upset over an argument with her boyfriend, so upset that she stomped away from their table at Anthony’s Homeport restaurant at the Des Moines marina. She’d been served alcohol because she carried fake I.D. Crying and angry, she was in a phone booth calling friends for a ride home when a stranger in a pickup truck pulled over and asked if she needed a ride.

She shook her head and tried to pull the folding door closed, but the man grabbed her and forced her into his truck before she could react.

“I’ll take you anywhere you want,” he said, now oddly polite.

She gave him her boyfriend’s address in tony Three Tree Point, hoping against hope that she would spot him on his way home and he would save her. The driver followed her directions but he drove right by the address, ignoring her protests. He headed toward the small town of Burien, grabbing her hair in his fist and telling her he would kill her if she tried to escape. In Burien, he parked on the grounds of a boarded-up school and raped her. Fighting him, she was finally able to hit the door handle and tumble out of the truck. She ran, and a nearby resident responded to her frantic knocking.

Treated in a hospital’s emergency room, the frightened girl could tell officers only that the man told her his name was “John.”

“What did he look like?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. It was too dark.”

There was no suggestion that this victim was working the streets. She had simply been in the wrong place at the very wrong time. Her description of the pickup truck was similar to the trucks seen on Pac HiWay.

Keli McGinness’s last-known location was about two miles from the Des Moines marina. Two disturbing incidents nine days apart. Ironically, the articles about both eighteen-year-olds shared space on the front page of the Des Moines News.

ON MAY 8, 1983, King County detectives had quietly investigated the discovery of a woman’s body in a location some distance from the Green River and the Strip. The circumstances surrounding this body site were so bizarrely ritualistic that they had first thought it had to be an entirely different killer. And the investigators were scrupulous about not releasing full information on what they found. Should they encounter either the actual murderer or a compulsive confessor, only they and the true killer would know these details.

Carol Ann Christensen, twenty-two, was the single mother of a five-year-old daughter, and she’d been excited on May 3 because she had finally landed a job after a long time of looking for work. Carol Ann lived near the Pac HiWay, and she shopped there, on foot because she had no car—but she was definitely not a prostitute. Her new job was as a waitress at the Barn Door Tavern at 148th and the highway. It was close to the White Shutters, the restaurant/bar that attracted singles, and only two or three blocks from the small mobile home park where Carol Ann lived, close enough that she could walk to work.

CAROL ANN had worked only a day or two when she failed to come home one night. Her mother was frantic. Carol adored her little girl, Sarah, and would not have deliberately left her. If she could get home to Sarah, she would have.

The terrible answer to where Carol Ann had gone came within a few days. Carol Ann Christensen’s body was discovered in an area known as Maple Valley, which is about twenty miles east of the airport Strip. Much of Maple Valley would be built up in the next twenty years, but it was heavily wooded when Carol Ann disappeared. A family searching for edible mushrooms had to go only a short distance off the road into a shady patch of salal, ferns, and fir trees to find the precious morels and chanterelles bursting from the woods’ leafy floor.

They forgot all thoughts of mushroom-hunting when they came upon a grotesque tableau. A woman lay on her back in a half-sitting position, but they could not see her face. Someone had pulled a brown grocery bag over her head. Her hands were folded across her belly, and they were topped with ground sausage meat. Two dead trout, cleaned and gutted, lay vertically along her throat. A wine bottle that had once held Lambrusco had been placed across her lower abdomen.

This was a “staged scene,” not uncommon to sexual psychopaths. It is a way to taunt detectives, silently saying “Catch me! Catch me!” And at the same time, announcing, “Look at how clever I am, and you don’t even know who did this. You can’t catch me!”

Carol Ann wasn’t in the river, and she hadn’t been left close to the Pacific Highway. She was not a prostitute. Still, like the first Green River victims, she had been strangled by ligature, in her case with a bright yellow, braided plastic rope, which her killer had left behind.

She was fully clothed in jeans; a Seattle Seahawk shirt; a white, zippered, polyester jacket; and blue-and-gray running shoes. The grocery bag said “Larry’s Market” on it, the high-end supermarket located on the Strip.