More likely, the body had “self-buried.” Many so-called shallow graves are not graves at all, but the natural result of the coming and going of seasons. Along Star Lake Road, as this body had decomposed, it literally returned to earth, sinking into the damp browning maple leaves beneath it. Wind storms brought more leaves down on top of it. With rain, snow, and wind, it would sink deeper with every season.

On the shoulder of Star Lake Road some fifteen feet from the body, which would not be identified for a long time, someone had dumped a load of garbage with a battered pair of work boots on top of it. But in the springtime, there would be silent benedictions there, too, a half-dozen white trilliums, a wildflower so rare that it is illegal to pick it in some areas, sprouted from the leaf carpet.

YVONNE SHELLY ANTOSH, who had come to Seattle from British Columbia, had been staying at a motel on the Strip with a girl she’d known since they were both children. In the almost five months since she disappeared on the highway, she hadn’t gotten in touch with her friend or with anyone else who knew her.

She couldn’t have, because Yvonne’s body had been left far away at S. 316th and the Auburn/Black Diamond Road. Long since skeletonized, her remains were discovered on October 15, 1983.

Connie Naon, whose car was found abandoned in the Red Lion parking lot, was dead, too. Gone on June 8, 1983, from S. 188th and the highway, Connie was found on October 27 very close by—at S. 191st and 25th Avenue South, almost directly under the flight path of planes taking off to the south. She had been left in the weeds near some big-leafed maple trees on empty land behind Alaska Airlines’ headquarters and the Sandstone Motel and Restaurant.

Two days later, in the same area, detectives located the remains of Kelly Ware. She had last been seen alive downtown on Madison Street on July 18, and she was found on October 29 at S. 190th and 24th Avenue South.

20

WHILE KELLY, Connie, and Yvonne were being found, more young women were disappearing.

Mary Sue Bello, twenty-five, was older than most of the missing girls and considered herself streetwise. She vanished on October 11, five weeks before her birthday. Almost everyone she met liked Mary, and her family treasured her, but she had taken chaotic chances with her life from the moment she entered puberty. Her mother, Suzanne, had cried millions of tears over Mary, and begged her to choose a different lifestyle.

But Mary had only laughed. Nothing was going to happen to her. She was too savvy to be conned by someone like the Green River Killer.

ANY EFFORT to understand Mary Sue has to begin years before her birth, because few of us come into this world without either suffering or benefiting from what has gone on before.

Despite years of searching, Mary’s mother, Suzanne Draper Villamin, had been able to glean only a few facts about her own life. Until she was ten, she believed that the parents she lived with in a comfortable home in Seattle’s Magnolia area were hers by birth. She was born in 1942, in an era when adoptive parents often chose not to tell children about the real circumstances of their birth. The Drapers decided to let Suzanne believe she was theirs. But she was in for a terrible shock.

“I was in the fifth grade—in Mrs. Graves’s class,” she remembered. “One of the kids in my class overheard my mother telling Mrs. Graves that I wasn’t really hers, that I was adopted. My classmate couldn’t wait to tell me, and it had a awful effect on me. I went home and told my mother what I’d heard and asked her if it was true. She had a terrible fit, but she would only admit that I was adopted. She wouldn’t tell me where I’d come from, and she discouraged my trying to find out.”

All Suzanne knew was that her birthday was April 9, 1942, and that she’d been born in Seattle. Later, she found out that her birth name was Beverly K. Gillam or Gilliam. When she was a little older, she found out more. Her parents had been married, and she was her mother’s fourth child and possibly her father’s, too. She wasn’t sure. She’d had twin sisters five years older than she. They had blond hair and blue eyes.

“There was a boy, too,” Sue said. “My mother drank heavily—I learned that. One time, she left the three older kids alone while she went out. There was a fire and they were able to save my twin sisters, but my brother died. And my parents broke up because of that.”

At some point in 1942, Sue’s mother headed for Alaska, but she left Sue, only a few months old, alone in a rooming house. It was three days before anyone discovered her and called the police.

“I was taken to the Medina Children’s Home,” she said. “And the Drapers adopted me when I was six months old, and since I wasn’t old enough to remember anything, they just let me grow up believing I’d been born to them.”

Her adoptive father was a strong, handsome man who was a foreman in a warehouse for a company located in Magnolia, one of Seattle’s most desirable neighborhoods, and the woman she would always call “mother” was a housewife. Her life with them was comfortable and happy. She grew up an only child, doted on by her parents and her maternal grandmother. But, from the time she was ten, she’d always wondered about her birth family.

“I’ve tried so many times to find my sisters,” she said. “But the Medina Children’s Home told me they’d had a fire and their records burned. I looked through the old newspapers, too, but I never found anything.”

Sue Draper became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl, Mary Sue, when she was only fifteen. “Oh, I made my share of mistakes, too,” she admitted. “My folks made me marry Mary Sue’s father. It was 1957 and women didn’t raise babies when they were single then.”

The Drapers had always been kind to Sue and they stood by her, even though they had insisted that she marry her boyfriend, who was nineteen. The marriage didn’t last; her husband went off to prison before Mary Sue was six months old.

“He wasn’t a very good robber,” Sue recalled. “He tried to hold up a Savings and Loan, thinking it was a bank. And then he broke into a cash register and got only a screwdriver and a penny. He tried to open the safe with the screwdriver.”

Sue and baby Mary moved in with her parents. And the deceptions began again. Mary Bello grew up believing her grandparents were her parents and that Sue was her older sister. It was the same situation in which Ted Bundy grew up—a subterfuge that backfired for both Mary Bello and Ted Bundy, leaving them full of distrust and rebellion. For that matter, Sue had been in the same boat herself.

Mary Bello found her baby book when she was ten—the same age her mother had been when she discovered her true parentage. But she was more aggressive and demanding than Sue had been. “She wanted to know why we hadn’t told her the truth,” Sue recalled. “I didn’t know what to tell her. She didn’t understand how rough it was for me to try to raise a baby alone when I was only fifteen. But Mary was never the same after she found out the truth.”

When Mary was about twelve, Sue bought a little house across the street from her parents, hoping to make a home for her daughter. But it was too late. Mary wouldn’t mind anyone. She ran away repeatedly, quickly got into drugs, and learned that she could make older men do things for her because she was pretty. Mary Bello wasn’t thirteen yet when she was committed to Grand Mound, the Washington State Training School for adolescent girls.