Still, many of my callers were quite rational people who were worried sick that someone they knew was the Green River Killer. I typed up the information that seemed to make an awful kind of sense and passed it on. Eventually, the task force detectives gave me a stack of their official tip sheets so I could streamline the process of sending them information on possible suspects. I didn’t expect to hear back from them; they were too busy to report to me, or to anyone beyond the relatives of the missing girls.

18

HE DIDN’T STOP KILLING.

The fact that more bodies had been discovered seemed only to have added another dimension to the Green River Killer’s game. He waited exactly one week after Shawnda Summers was found before he went out prowling again.

 

APRIL DAWN BUTTRAM had just moved to Seattle from Spokane. She was almost eighteen, a pretty girl with blond hair and rosy cheeks, who would have looked in her element at a country church supper or a square dance. She was just a little over five feet tall, and she had sometimes weighed as much as 175, but she had slimmed down quite a bit. Hers was an all too familiar story. Overnight, April had changed from an obedient child to a teenager who quit school, tried drugs and alcohol, and wanted to party all the time.

She was eager to leave Spokane for the much more cosmopolitan city of Seattle, and she wouldn’t listen to her mother’s arguments against it. April was confident she could make it. When she reached her eighteenth birthday, she could collect a $10,000 trust fund a relative had set up for her. But in the middle of the summer of 1983, April planned to catch a ride to Seattle with two girlfriends, one of whom had permission to drive her mother’s car on the trip. None of them had any notion of what dangers might be out there, or much common sense.

“One night,” April’s mother recalled, “I caught her crawling out of the window, carrying a suitcase. I gave up. I just told her, ‘At least have the guts to go out the front door.’ And she did. And she never came back.”

The trio of Spokane girls had picked up three male hitchhikers on their way to Seattle, but they were lucky so far. The men didn’t harm them—they were just grateful for the ride. A few days after they got to Seattle, April and her girlfriends split up.

The last accurate sighting of April Buttram was in the Rainier Valley in southeast Seattle around the middle of August 1983. She was still seventeen, but she was definitely planning to travel back to Spokane, three hundred miles away, to withdraw her trust fund money. She didn’t make it. The money remained, untouched.

April was officially reported missing on March 24, 1984, after months of denial on her family’s part. Her mother feared that she would get a phone call one day telling her that someone had found April’s body, but there was only silence.

 

DEBORA MAY ABERNATHY was twenty-six, and she had come to Seattle along a circuitous route from Waco, Texas. She was a frail little woman who stood five feet tall and weighed only ninety pounds. She had very attractive features, but she sometimes put on horn-rimmed glasses and instantly looked like an old-time, stereotypical librarian, very prim and studious. She, her boyfriend, and her three-year-old son came to Seattle in late July of 1983 looking for a fresh start.

They were soon out of funds. A kindhearted couple met the down-and-out family in a store and invited them to stay in a room in their house until they could “get on their feet.” Debora, wearing a burgundy jumpsuit, was headed toward downtown Seattle on September 5 the last time her little boy and boyfriend saw her.

 

TRACY ANN WINSTON was going to be twenty on September 29, 1983. Of all the young women one might expect to find in jail, Tracy seemed the least likely. She and her parents and two younger brothers all loved each other a lot. Any one of them would do anything to protect her. But Tracy had had her problems, too, almost from the moment she turned thirteen and plunged into puberty. It is, of course, an age when parents often wonder what has happened to their sweet daughters, and when daughters find their parents boring, old-fashioned, and uncaring. Tracy disappeared on September 12.

The investigators thought they had detected a pattern. If the Green River Killer was responsible for these recent disappearances, he seemed to be taking victims a week apart at this point, almost exclusively on weeknights. Did the days of the week mean something important, or was it mere coincidence? But Tracy’s vanishing broke the pattern. Counting back, they saw that she was last seen on a Sunday night/Monday morning between eleven PM and one AM. She had been in the King County Jail in downtown Seattle on a loitering charge.

Tracy bailed out of jail, and she was walking along Cherry Street, near the jail, when she was last seen by a cabdriver she knew who pulled up beside her. (It was not Melvyn Foster.) She needed a ride to the place where she was staying out in the north end of Seattle, but he told her he had a fare in the other direction out to the airport. Later, the driver told Green River investigators about their conversation.

“I’ll be back in forty-five minutes,” he’d promised Tracy. “Stay here and I’ll see that you get where you need to go safely.”

Tracy had called her father, Chuck Winston, from jail that night; she had been mortified at being locked up for the first and only time of her life. The experience had shocked her so much that she vowed she would never, ever do anything that might put her there again. She begged her father and her mother, Mertie, not to come down, saying, “I don’t want you to see me in here, not like this. Please don’t come down here.”

And they had honored her wishes, fighting the urge to get in their car and hurry down to 9th and Cherry.

Mertie and Chuck Winston had been just about Tracy’s age when she was born. “I was an older woman though,” Mertie remembered. “In those days, a female was considered of age when she was eighteen, but a male had to be twenty-one, and I was a couple of months older than Chuck. His mother always looked upon me as a ‘scarlet woman’ who seduced her son.”

Tracy was born in Tacoma, Washington, where her mother had been born. Mertie was working at the phone company and Chuck was getting ready to go into the air force, so Mertie lived with her maternal grandmother at the time of Tracy’s birth. Their circumstances were such that Mertie couldn’t take care of Tracy and work, too, but she fell in love with the baby who had deep dimples just like Chuck’s. A Catholic Charities caseworker tried to help Mertie decide what would be best for Tracy.

At the time, it seemed that placing the baby in a foster home was the best plan. But Mertie’s heart ached from missing her baby. She spent every extra penny she had to buy booties, blankets, and little dresses for Tracy and her caseworker saw to it that they were given to Tracy’s temporary foster mother. “I found out later that the woman had a baby girl herself, and she was giving Tracy’s things to her baby,” Mertie recalled. “Finally, I couldn’t stand it. Tracy was meant to be with me all the time, so I went and got her, and I was so happy.”

Chuck Winston, whose talent and interests lay in military communications, was sent to an air base in Savannah, Georgia, and Mertie and Tracy went with him. They found a tiny apartment that had been carved out of an older home. Their landlady was very nice but the steamy, oppressive heat of Savannah was suffocating to anyone who had been raised in the Pacific Northwest. The worst, however, were the cockroaches.