“That was about the only education she ever had, even though she was very intelligent,” Sue remembered. “By the time she got home two years later, she was lost to us. She would come home off and on, and then she’d get mad and leave. If she was mad at me, she could go to my folks’ house. My mom would baby Mary and let her get away with things, just like she did when Mary was a baby. For many years, Mary never faced up to anything. She would go from me to my mom’s, to her friends, and then back again to me. She always had someplace to go when she got angry at whoever she was staying with.”

Mary Bello was emancipated when she was fifteen years old. She wasn’t really employable in a straight job. She worked for a while at a Burger King, but lost her job because her friends kept coming in and causing a commotion. She was a lovely girl with pale skin, and dark eyes and hair. She was five feet seven and willowy, and she found it easier to use her looks to make money than to work at minimum wage jobs that were meant for kids.

When she was nineteen, Mary followed her mother to Arizona, stayed for a little while, and then went on to Texas by herself. She worked as an exotic dancer in Tucson and got a discreet tattoo; it was a tiny lobster etched low on one buttock. Her favorite record to dance to was “Summer Nights” by Glen Campbell.

Although she seemed satisfied with her life, Mary had always wondered what her real father was like. She’d met him only briefly once when she was about sixteen. At that time, he’d told her he had “found religion.” He was preaching on street corners and collecting money “for the poor.” Sue found out he kept the money for himself, to buy liquor. She tried to keep that information away from Mary, feeling that it would be better if she didn’t know her father was a con man.

At nineteen, Mary was still determined to know her father. Reluctantly, Sue Villamin told her where to find him in Arizona, but she went along and parked nearby because she didn’t know what he would do.

“He tried to rape her,” Sue said. “He locked her in his place and wouldn’t let her out. I had this big German shepherd with me and I pounded on the door until her father finally let her go. But Mary had to accept that she really didn’t have a father. Never did have.”

Remembering her only child, Sue’s eyes misted. “Mary went through so much pain. She was waiting in a man’s car once when he went into a fish restaurant to get a take-out dinner. But he’d really gone in to rob the place. She didn’t know he was going to do that, but she was arrested for robbery, too, and she was convicted and had to serve time at the women’s prison in Purdy. She said it wasn’t too bad; she got to stay in these separate little ‘apartments’ up on the hill.”

Headstrong and willful, teenage Mary Bello blamed her mother for the bad things in her life, and she grew addicted to drugs—heroin and cocaine—turning to prostitution to pay for her habit. She took chances all the time, sure that she had a protective shield around her. Even though Sue Villamin couldn’t understand why Mary chose the life she had, they began to grow closer when Mary was in her early twenties. They were friends now, and that made sense because they were only fifteen years apart in age.

Mary was a rebel but she was kindness personified. She would help anyone in need, often giving her last dollar to beggars on the street. And she had a wild sense of humor. “I’d get so mad at her,” her mother said, “and then she had this funny little smile. I couldn’t stay mad.”

Mary was a good cook, and she loved holidays, never missing Thanksgiving or Christmas with her family. On the last Christmas of her life, she showed up with her arms full of presents, none of them wrapped. In 1982, she had “overbought” for everyone, but she looked delighted as her mother and grandparents enjoyed their gifts.

Mary Bello was afraid to trust men enough to love one, although she may have loved a man named “Jimmy.” He wasn’t a pimp, and he cared for her. Following the pattern she’d set all of her life, she would live with him for a while and then move out. But, in her twenties, she always came back to him.

Sue Villamin begged Mary to stop prostituting herself, and Mary looked at her as if she were speaking another language. “She’d been robbed and beaten by johns, and she still wouldn’t quit,” Sue remembered. “She wanted me to know what her life was like. And I didn’t want to hear. It seemed like the more I shut my ears, the more she told me. She said she didn’t like it, but it supported her habit, and it gave her a certain kind of ‘power’ over men. I don’t know, maybe because of the way her father treated her.”

Sue pleaded with her to find another way to live.

“No,” Mary replied. “This is the way I have to make my money.”

They talked quite a bit about the Green River Killer and Mary pooh-poohed her mother’s concern. “Don’t worry about it. I can avoid him. Mother, he’ll never get me—I’ll be all right. I don’t want to hear about him!”

And then she laughed because it was so ridiculous for anyone to be concerned about her.

One thing her mother never knew was that Mary was very aware of the threat the so-called Green River Killer posed—not so much for herself, but for the vulnerable kids who had just come to the Strip. On September 12, 1983, her concern had led her to call a detective she knew on the task force with a tip.

“Look,” she said, “I want you to know that I had a date with a really weird john. I’m okay, but he has a lot of knives in his car and at his house, too.”

The guy was older, and he drove a recent model blue sedan. She didn’t know the make of the car or the license plate number, but she recalled that his house was at 218th and Military Road. Mary Bello’s report was checked, and it became part of the huge permanent file on the unsolved Green River cases.

Finally, Mary and her mother reached a kind of détente. Mary lived in one or another of the motels on the Pac HiWay, and Sue lived in a mobile home about ten miles south on the same highway. All that summer of 1983, Mary was trying hard to overcome her heroin habit, which necessitated her going to Tacoma—a fifteen-mile trip—every day to get methadone to ease her withdrawal symptoms.

“She would take the bus down to my trailer,” Sue said. “And I would drive her on down to Tacoma, wait for her, and bring her back to my trailer, and she’d catch the bus again.”

Sue had a fleeting feeling of doom on that beautiful October day, like a tattered gray curtain brushing by the yellow maple leaves. She watched Mary’s back as she walked away from her trailer toward the bus stop.

“I love you!” Sue called out.

“Mary looked back and she smiled at me. That was the last time I ever saw her. I think I knew it was, too, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.”

MARY BELLO always called home every two days, no matter where she was. Now, her birthday passed, and Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Her grandmother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and they all hoped she would call. They needed her. “She’s just gone off someplace,” her grandmother said. She had always avoided letting harsh truths surface. “She’ll show up. You watch, she’ll show up.”

It would be a long time before any of them knew where Mary was. Sue Villamin kept a quote close to her that helped her deal with losing Mary: “Times Change; Love Doesn’t.” She also had a thought of her own that others might heed: “The punishment for prostitution should not be death.”

But she didn’t know if Mary was dead or alive.