As Missy tried to tell her mother about how tough her life had been and how she had missed having her own family, Patricia felt both guilty and repelled. Missy’s being in group homes and girls’ training schools bothered her. She had somehow expected a grown-up daughter who had turned out well.

Patricia, who worked for a film-processing company in a kiosk in a strip mall, didn’t have the funds to help Missy move close to her and her current male companion. Besides, Missy was her usual self as a house guest and left everything a mess. Patricia was close to her older daughter; Missy was more of a burden. And after too many drinks, Patricia said a terrible thing. “You’ve got so many problems,” she told Missy, “maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t resuscitated you when you were born.”

It was like a knife in Missy’s heart. She had spent her whole life counting on her dream, and now she realized that her mother didn’t even care if she was alive or dead. Worse, her mother seemed to wish she had never lived.

Missy called her father and told him that things hadn’t gone well in Reno. She was going back to the Seattle-Tacoma area. Her mother had bought her a one-way ticket as a Christmas present. “When she left,” her mother recalled later, “I gave her a turquoise- and-silver ring. It wasn’t expensive, but she told me she’d never take it off.”

It was almost 1983, and after that, Missy just seemed to drift. She missed appointments with social workers and counselors to talk about her children and what would be best for them. She lived here and there. Her half sister (her father’s daughter by another woman) found Missy and told her she’d been searching for her for twenty years. She had traced their father’s genealogy and found Missy. Joanie* came up to Washington State and they tried living together for about two weeks, but it was too late to establish a sister/sister relationship. Joanie’s life had been better than Missy’s and she had a solid career and different values.

Around that time, Missy tried suicide, leaving long vertical scars on her wrists. Some of her friends found her in time, but she didn’t believe in anything anymore. By 1983, she hated men. It seemed as though every man she’d ever known had either ignored her or mis-treated her. Her twin was down in Texas with their father—both of them on parole after serving time for some kind of scam—working in a restaurant together. There was a good chance her daughter was going to be adopted, and her son was living with her friend Maia, who was the closest thing to a mother Missy had, but she was scared to death that the Washington Department of Social and Health Services was going to take Darrell away from her, too.

In early 1983, Missy lived for a few weeks or a month at a time with men she thought were friends—they weren’t. She confided in Maia that she realized one older man was trying to groom her to be a prostitute by getting her hooked on drugs, so she left him.

But Missy did get hooked on drugs. She bought some at a building that was once a church but was anything but that in the summer of 1983. It had become a teenage “rave” club called The Monastery. The Seattle Police Department and the King County Prosecutor’s Office were investigating the seamy dark club and would close it down within two years, but it was an easy place for underage kids to score drugs in 1983. Missy was in the process that summer of getting a grotesque tattoo—a werewolf that extended from just beneath her chin to her lower abdomen. It wasn’t filled in yet; just the ugly outline was traced.

Finally, she gave in to the pressure to work the streets. In April 1983, she’d been living in a tiny basement apartment, where she could just about afford the cheap rent. A few months later, she called a female attorney who had helped her before. “She was strung out on drugs and terrified that she would lose her kids,” the woman recalled. “I hadn’t talked to her for a while and I don’t know what happened…she’d been enthusiastic about going back to school to get her GED, but now she was going downhill fast. She had always been looking for approval, and failing in most categories. I know she lied to her mother when she left Reno, telling her that she had a boyfriend waiting for her to come home. But she didn’t. She had no one.”

Missy’s intimate friends knew that she would not allow johns to have actual intercourse with her. She would perform only oral sex, telling those women closest to her, “Anything else would be a violation of my inner body.” “She would do car dates or go to motels,” a friend who was like a sister said. “She would never go to a john’s house.”

And still, Missy hoped to get enough money and a good enough apartment to bring her children home. In the early fall of 1983, she was attending parenting classes, praying that she would need them.

But she was a paradox. Only weeks later, Missy and the friend who was like a sister, who had also turned to prostitution, traveled to Olympia, Washington, to earn “big money” by participating in a threesome. The john didn’t pay them, laughing at them instead. From there, on a whim, they either took a bus or hitchhiked to Virginia or North Carolina where the other girl had relatives. There, they had a disagreement and split up.

Somehow Missy scraped up the money to get back to Seattle. She made it home and moved in with another friend, only to disappear at Halloween. Maia reported her missing when she never showed up to go to the storage unit to pick up the Halloween costume. She described Missy’s petite figure, her blond hair, her tattoos, the little turquoise ring, the “trache” scar, and the gap she had between her upper middle front teeth. “Her teeth are pretty nice, but she does have that space there.”

Just before Christmas, 1983, Missy’s father, Dennis, received a strange phone call at his home in Texas. It was a woman who cried, “Dad! I’ll be home for Christmas!” And then the line went dead. He could not say whose voice it was.

Barbara, Missy’s long-ago housemother, recalled hearing that Missy was believed to be a victim of the Green River Killer. “Then, of course, came the horrifying day when we heard her name on the news, and saw her sad face in a picture in the newspaper,” Barbara said. “She did not deserve that fate. She was a sweet child who had so much working against her. And the sadness continued when we read that she was a mother herself and that her children had been taken from her. We never learned any of the details, but it was not surprising that the cycle would be repeating itself, as is so often the case. It is important that someone, somewhere, be on record that she was a child who really cared, that she mattered, and that she had suffered so much heartache and loss in her short life. And she didn’t deserve to die such a horrific death.”

NONE OF THEM DID.

Pammy Avent, Patricia Osborn, and Missy Plager were all slender and small-boned. Kim Nelson, twenty, also known as Tina Lee Tomson, was almost six feet tall, and a strong young woman. She had a sullen sexiness, short yellow-blond hair, and D-cup breasts that made her especially attractive to the men who drove along streets and highways looking for “dates.” For some reason, it was always the tall police officer decoys who attracted the most johns along the Strip. Maybe it was because the tall girls were unusual and stood out from the average.

BORN in Michigan, Tina grew up as Kimberly Nelson. She had dropped out of Ann Arbor’s Pioneer High School in the eleventh grade and somehow made her way to Seattle, with many stops along the way. Back home, she had her mother, Greta; her stepfather, Ed Turner; and sisters who worried about her. Her father, Howard Nelson, lived in Florida. But Tina had stretched the cord leading home too far to go back. She’d phoned her sister to say she wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas 1983, because she couldn’t afford the trip. Her mother sent her money, but Kim never showed up.