Keli McGinness was the last to disappear in June, as far as the police knew. Coincidentally, the next girl on the list was also named Kelly, although she spelled it differently. She resembled all the other young women in that she was blessed with the freshness of youth, even those whose only photos were mug shots where they looked tired and sad.

Kelly Ware, twenty-three, smiled happily in the pictures her family had. She had long dark hair and huge brown eyes. She disappeared on July 18, 1983. Just like Cheryl Wims, Kelly was last seen in the central district in Seattle, an ethnically mixed neighborhood a few miles east of downtown, where streets crested and then plunged down a long hill toward the shores of Lake Washington.

IT HAD BEEN almost exactly a year since the first five bodies were found in the Green River, and yet the only other victim to be located who seemed to be linked to the GRK was Giselle Lovvorn, the self-confident blonde, who had a genius I.Q. and had been discovered in the deserted property area south of the airport. Surely, there were so many more lost girls out there somewhere, calling out silently to be found.

Now, slowly, as if the earth itself were aware of the dread anniversary, it began to give up the pathetic remains of more victims who had been left there.

On August 11, 1983, a couple, who had gone to pick apples from abandoned trees in the same overgrown yards where Giselle Lovvorn was left, stumbled across bones behind three empty houses. They hurried to call the sheriff’s office.

What lay behind the shells of homes was merely a skeleton, still partially covered with brush and trash, much of it scattered by animals. But there was a skull, too. That could help immeasurably in identifying whose remains they were.

While anxious families watched and tensely waited, Dick Kraske spoke carefully to reporters. Yes, his office had some possibilities of matching the dental work of the deceased to known and suspected victims. The task force had compiled records from as many dentists’ charts as possible.

The Green River victims, however, weren’t the only missing persons near the airport. One long-unsolved mystery was the disappearance of Joyce Kennedy, a Pan American ticket agent, who had walked away from her counter after finishing her shift way back in 1976. She had never been found. Port of Seattle detectives had preserved her records for seven years.

Dick Kraske still didn’t comment to reporters on a specific number of possible victims in the Green River cases because, quite frankly, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know. In August 1983, many who were gone had yet to be reported as missing. Kraske noted that, officially, there were seven young women missing—which, when added to the six girls who were known to be dead, made thirteen. But three of the missing hadn’t been gone long enough to be in the state of complete decomposition that the apple tree victim was.

Dental charts showed matches to the skull that established the identity of Shawnda Leea Summers. Shawnda, who had once lived in Bellevue, had been missing since either October 7 or 8 in 1982. Her family had looked for her in vain for ten months, and it was likely that she had been here beneath the apple trees since her disappearance.

It was impossible to determine the cause of her death. There were no broken bones, no skull fractures, no bullet holes nicking the bones they’d found. Animals had scattered the tiny neck bones that might have indicated strangulation.

Two days after Shawnda was found beneath the airport flight path, another set of remains was found buried nearby. They were not easily identifiable, and the first victim to be known only as “Bones” was added as a possible to the Green River list.

Would he stop killing now that two more victims had been discovered? Would he find that the investigators were getting too close and feel as if he was in imminent danger of being caught? If he was true to serial killer form, the so-called Green River Killer might very well be spooked enough that his grim handiwork was being revealed to move on. It had to be only a matter of time before more of the missing women surfaced. And with every body discovery, the chance that he had unwittingly left something of himself behind, some tiny bit of damning evidence, would grow.

At least, the public was becoming more aware that there was someone truly menacing still roving free. The King County Sheriff’s Office now had three hundred suspects, along with their names, descriptions, and witnesses’ suspicions and accusations. Still, it was problematic whether the GRK was hidden somewhere in that roster of suspects.

I WAS HAVING a small taste of what the detectives were going through as they fielded waves of phone calls and messages. All during 1983, I received phone calls from strangers—at least one or two every night at first, and then about one a week. A lot of people had read my book The Stranger Beside Me, published two years before the Green River cases began. They wanted to compare their feelings with my own because I had known Ted Bundy well—or at least I thought I had. Many were hesitant to call the task force directly, or they were impatient because they hadn’t had an immediate response. All the callers believed that they knew who the Green River Killer was. They didn’t know how many other people felt the same way. I didn’t mind being a conduit for frustrated tipsters, but I knew I was getting only a minuscule number of tips compared to those the sheriff’s detectives were juggling.

In the beginning, I found most of the callers believable. In fact, at the end of most calls, I’ll admit I thought “This has got to be the right man,” only to find the next tip, and the next, even more compelling.

Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly—a lot of women were turning in their ex-husbands. Some even suspected the men they were still married to. I had once been a sex crimes detective in the Seattle Police Department for a year and a half. Combining that experience with the fourteen years I wrote about homicide and rape cases for fact-detective magazines, I thought I had heard everything. I was mistaken. My callers had been married to, or were still married to, some of the kinkiest men I’d ever heard of. And most of them lived in the south end of King County.

One woman said her husband invariably returned from sales trips with baggies full of various-colored pubic hair. Another’s husband liked to cut up Playboy centerfolds and then play at rear-ranging the severed limbs and heads. And one ex-husband was apparently writing a book from the first-person viewpoint of a teenage streetwalker. His concerned ex-wife wondered if this was a bad enough sign for her to rethink reconciling with him. I didn’t know, but I told her it certainly would have given me pause.

After hearing dozens of weird stories, I could see that the Green River cases were rapidly becoming the most difficult challenge any law enforcement group could encounter—not because the task force wasn’t getting enough information from the public, but because it was getting too much.

It was fairly easy for me to discern when a tip was from a deranged informant. The woman who believed her son-in-law had killed a hundred people and hidden their bodies in the woods behind his house seemed suspect, especially when the number grew with every minute—and my watch indicated I’d been on the phone with her for more than an hour.

Psychics with “visions” called, but their information was never precise enough to be of any help. Barbara Kubik-Patten called me a lot, complaining that the task force detectives were not giving her the attention she deserved.