By the time Tina was living in the Northwest, she was the sole support of a pimp, a man who was distraught when she was sentenced to the King County Jail for prostitution in early October 1983. He had whined that he didn’t know how he would survive without the money she provided by turning tricks. She was three or four months pregnant, but that didn’t matter to him. Her pregnancy may have been the reason why she didn’t go home to Ann Arbor for Christmas, but more likely, she couldn’t go home ever again.

After the holidays, Kim’s boyfriend called her family to ask if she was with them. They told him they hadn’t talked to her since long before Christmas.

Kim/Tina had so many street names that sometimes even she had trouble remembering “who” she was at any given moment. She and her girlfriend Paige Miley didn’t know each other all that well. Paige knew Tina as “Star,” and that was all. Their pimps were friends, and they moved the young women who kept them from having to find honest jobs from place to place, wherever the men felt there was the most money to be made.

When Kim/Tina/Star got out of jail just before Halloween, she and Paige were driven from Aurora Avenue in north Seattle to the SeaTac Strip, and they moved into the Ben Carol Motel. They worked two nights at the Evergreen Truck Stop in Federal Way, but Paige got arrested by Scott Wales, an undercover King County detective, warned, and released.

Afterward, Paige was never absolutely positive of the date when she last saw Tina. It was either the day of Halloween or November 1. She did remember it was raining hard at eleven in the morning, and it was cold out. Detectives Randy Mullinax and Matt Haney’s records showed that Paige had reported Tina missing on October 31. Of course, she reported her as “Star” Tomson aka Tina Tomson. The fact that most of the missing and murdered girls had so many aliases was one more burden the Green River Task Force had to juggle as investigators patiently worked their way through a morass of information.

If Tina disappeared on Halloween morning, that would have been only twenty hours after Missy Plager vanished. Tina and Paige had stood talking just before noon at 141st and the Pac HiWay, as the rainy wind ruffled their hair. They weren’t familiar with the Strip and probably didn’t realize they were right at ground zero in the south end. They were aware of someone called the Green River Killer, but Tina wasn’t afraid of him. “Star wasn’t afraid of anyone,” Paige said. “She would get in a car with anyone—she was so confident she could take care of herself.”

Tina said she was only going to work long enough to “earn the rent money.” The rent was only about $25 a night; the two girls were also trying to save money by cooking their own meals in their room.

Paige picked up a trick first and left with him for a car date. When she got back fifteen or twenty minutes later, Tina wasn’t standing by the highway, so Paige figured she either had a date or she’d gone back to their motel. It was so cold that she decided to return to the Ben Carol. But Tina wasn’t there, and she didn’t come back—ever.

Two days later, as Paige looked up and down the rain-soaked highway, a dark red pickup with a white canopy stopped and the driver signaled to her. “Didn’t you hang around with a tall blond girl?” he asked.

That made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. She shook her head slightly. He offered her money to turn a trick with him, but there was something about him that Paige didn’t like. He refused to go to her room; he wanted a car date. She didn’t go with him.

The case of the tall blond girl whose name was either “Star” or Tina Tomson or Kris Nelson or Kimberly Nelson was assigned to Mullinax and Haney. Paige had described the man in the red pickup as white, in good shape, about five feet ten, wearing a plaid shirt and possibly a baseball cap. Probably around thirty-five years old.

According to Paige, “Star” had been wearing black, pin-striped slacks, a pink blouse, a long black leather coat, and blue Nike shoes the last time she had seen her. Nothing else was missing from their motel room. Detective Cherisse “Cheri” Luxa took possession of Star/Tina’s things—a few clothes, hair rollers, toothbrush, makeup—and put them into evidence.

ONLY A SMALL PERCENTAGE of the missing girls’ remains had been found. The killer had somehow managed to hide most of them, a fact that brought horrible images to the minds of the public and the task force detectives. He had left most of the bodies thus far discovered unburied, hastily covered with tree branches or debris. He didn’t appear to care anything about them, just threw them away like broken dolls.

Still, the task force detectives found that he had gone to the trouble of burying the dead girl someone found on November 13, 1983, in a wooded area only a few hundred yards west of Pac HiWay and about four blocks from the Red Lion. Actually, there were two victims—a young woman whose womb still cradled her almost full-term fetus. The baby had died with her. The pregnant girl lay faceup with her knees slightly bent to the left. She and her baby weren’t buried more than two or three feet deep, but the killer had scooped out enough dirt to cover this victim’s body. What had been different? Was it because this girl had been pregnant and that had made his violence more shameful? Did he, perhaps, have some feeling for his victims?

This grave had held Mary Bridget Meehan, who had lost her first two babies through miscarriage and been persuaded to give her third up for adoption. Now she had been robbed of giving birth to this infant, or to any baby ever again.

How many more victims were there? Were they searching for some brilliant maniac who could take on experienced investigators and thumb his nose at them?

It seemed so.

22

SCHOOLWORK never got any easier for him, although he took some satisfaction in his ability to have secrets from all the students who thought they knew everything.

As much as he fantasized about having sex with various girls and women, he hadn’t had much luck actually accomplishing it. There was a girl who was a couple of years older than he who lived over in Kitsap County. They’d hooked up once and that was the first time he’d actually had sexual intercourse. She was a lot more experienced than he was, and he knew she was a little scornful of his performance.

“For some reason,” he said later, “we never did it again. I don’t know why. Just didn’t.”

He wasn’t a reader or good at math, but he was pretty good at fixing things, and his dad taught him about cars, even though, like everything else, it took him a lot longer to learn the steps than it would most people. He liked hiking and fishing and being in the woods. He liked being alone and watching people who didn’t know he was watching them.

He worked as a busboy at the Hyatt Hotel near the airport in 1965 and 1966, and then he got a job at the Gov-Mart Bazaar, a store that sold mostly bargain items bought from closeouts at other companies. He finally had a few girlfriends in high school, but they wouldn’t have sex with him. Eventually, he did meet a girl who would agree to go steady with him. He bought a hamburger from the fast-food place where she worked, and when he took a bite, he found she’d slipped in a piece of paper with her name and phone number on it. On a date, he attempted to have sex with her at a drive-in movie, but he ejaculated prematurely before he even entered her. After that, they had intercourse regularly.

HE HAD HAD so much difficulty with reading and academic subjects that getting through school seemed an endless process. He was twenty when he graduated, and he hadn’t given much thought to what he was going to do in life. He considered joining the service and learning a trade there.