She couldn’t remember the vehicle the man was driving, but Tracy had seemed to know him, and she certainly didn’t appear to be at all afraid of him.

 

MAUREEN FEENEY was as Irish as Mary Bridget Meehan, and she looked it. She could have been a nanny or a college student or a novitiate in a nunnery. Although she wasn’t beautiful, she had a nice, open face with pretty blue eyes and she smiled often. She came from a large family, and at nineteen she was emotionally immature and naive, but she yearned for adventure and to be on her own. Maureen was thrilled to find a little mother-in-law apartment she could afford in January 1983. She moved to Eastgate, a neighborhood just south of the I-90 Freeway near Bellevue, and she worked for the Eastside Christian School, a benign place for a girl whose family was concerned about her.

Maureen had never dated in high school, and she still didn’t have a boyfriend. Her best friend recalled that she talked to Maureen almost every day on the phone, and she’d been surprised that her shy friend was going out to clubs and had started drinking. That wasn’t like Maureen, and she wasn’t handling alcohol very well. Sometimes her words slurred a little on the phone.

Like so many teenagers, Maureen’s self-image in high school had been very low; although she wasn’t anorexic, she had occasionally cut herself with razor blades—thin, shallow slices—on her upper arms where it wouldn’t show. She once told her best friend that she’d sat in her family’s garage with the car motor running. Her mother had found her before anything bad happened.

Maureen loved her first tiny apartment, but she had to move out when the landlord told her a relative wanted to move in. She found another place in Seattle’s Central District at 15th and E. Madison, an area with a much higher crime rate than Eastgate. She told her mother she had chosen her new neighborhood because she wanted to work with underprivileged children. She did get a job at a day-care facility and worked there in the late summer/early fall of 1983. Her friend Kathy visited her almost every day. Toward the end of August, Maureen told Kathy that she had a boyfriend, and she seemed excited about that. She’d met him at a bus stop near her apartment. She noted their meeting in her date book: “August 23—I met Eddie J.* today!”

Kathy was anxious to meet Eddie J. She knew he was of a different race from Maureen, but that didn’t matter as long as he was nice to her friend. But he was never there when Kathy came to Maureen’s apartment. There was always some excuse why he had to be out and about.

Although Maureen usually spent her weekends at her family’s house or at their vacation home, they still felt uneasy about her living in the Central District. Her brother Brian sent her a check for quite a bit of money so she could afford to move back home, but she evidently didn’t want to. She told Kathy that she and Eddie J. were going to go to California.

“How are you going to afford that?” Kathy asked.

“Oh, Eddie J. has lots of ways to make money,” Maureen answered. “We’ll be fine.”

But she never got to California—at least as far as detectives could determine. Exactly one week before Maureen’s twentieth birthday, she left her apartment forever. It was September 28, 1983. Three years later, Eddie J., a reluctant witness, told task force detective Kevin O’Keefe, who was on loan from the Seattle Police Department, that Maureen left sometime between five and six PM that day. “She told me she was going to the Seven-Eleven. I fell asleep after she left and I didn’t wake up until about eleven that night. She never came back.”

Eddie J. thought she might have gone looking for a job. He had found a newspaper with an ad circled on Maureen’s dresser. It read “Exotic Dancers Wanted: ‘Sugar’s.’ ” The name “Bob” was written in the margin beside the ad.

The thought of sweet Maureen Feeney performing as an exotic dancer seemed ridiculous to her best friend and her family. Eddie J. claimed to be completely baffled about where she might be and said he had no idea about her activities outside of her day-care job.

Her employer, however, said that she had seen “a notable personality change” over the two months before she vanished. Only a few days before September 28, Maureen had come to her and said she wouldn’t be needing a job for very long because she was “coming into money.”

She told her mother that she planned to quit her day-care job because she couldn’t get enough time off when she needed it. Another resident in the apartment house where Maureen lived told O’Keefe that he had heard her having an argument with Eddie J. in the hallway the night she disappeared.

Maureen’s brother Brian and her brother-in-law searched for her for a long time, putting up posters with her picture anywhere they thought people might recognize her, asking for someone, anyone, who might have a clue to where she was to come forward.

But it seemed if she had walked into the twilight and been swallowed up by the night.

19

PERHAPS the most frightening thing about the Green River murders was the bleak interweaving of the disappearances and the discoveries of bodies. How the puppeteer must be enjoying his string-pulling. One thing the task force detectives were sure of—was that he was out there someplace, watching. If he didn’t actually live in the south end of King County, Washington, he was most certainly flying or driving in and out to kill again and again. He must be having a ball watching television and reading newspapers.

Whether he was the person who sent helpful advice to the Green River investigators may never be proven absolutely. But a “helpful” directive came into their headquarters. It was written in shaky handwriting, and was rife with spelling mistakes. The writer, anonymous, titled his work: “Going About Catching the GRK.”

He explained that he was the GRK, and that he had been doing many things to throw the detectives’ investigation off track. For instance, he bragged about dating between twenty and forty “prostetutes [sic] whom he hadn’t killed. I needed them out there alive in case I got caught—to say I didn’t hurt them.

“All custumers dont want photos taken of them with prostetutes All police cars should cary a small camera (instamatic) Take pictures of custumers with ladys. Out of car & in. If the lady died he would be the last one seen with her.”

The writer admonished the police to have better relations with the women on the street, and to ask them about their customers.

They were already doing that.

“All crime sites take vedio of people watching (That wouldn’t have cought me though).”

It was September 1983 now. And there had been three more disappearances in one month. It had been fourteen months since the first body was discovered in the Green River.

TEN MILES SOUTH of the Strip, a winding road leads down toward the once-verdant Green River Valley from Pac HiWay at about S. 272nd Street. Close to the bottom of the hill is a narrow road: Star Lake Road. In the mid-1980s, both sides of the road were thickly wooded, even though new homes and an elementary school were only a few blocks away. On the downhill side of the road, twenty-five or so feet beyond the shoulder, a deep gorge dropped away, ending in a narrow creek.

On September 18, 1983, what would become known as the “Star Lake Road site” began to be unveiled. Although it seemed impossible—and still does—a passerby found skeletonized remains near a tree just where the bank started its plunge downward. It was so close to the road, how could it be that no one had smelled the unforgettably horrible stench of a human corpse, unburied, disintegrating? How could a body have lain there undiscovered for so long? Was it possible that someone had carried the bones there after the person had died?