“We were told that absent a surge protector, the data that had been entered had been eliminated by a power surge most likely originating in the building’s elevator system,” Kraske recalled. “We were never able to catch up to organizing all the information we were receiving in a retrieval system that could have saved a lot of valuable time.”

More than anything, it was the agony that everyone on every task force felt or would feel because they were failing to stop the man who kept killing and killing and killing. If he knew that the King County Sheriff’s Office was gearing up its efforts to catch him, the Green River Killer wasn’t in the least dissuaded from his grisly avocation. So far, he had walked away free. Even as Christmas lights twinkled on the huge fir tree outside the Southcenter Mall, he was prowling along the nearby streets that paralleled the I-5 Freeway.

LISA LORRAINE YATES vanished two days before Christmas 1983. She was a very attractive nineteen-year-old with dark eyes, thick blond, wavy hair, and, despite her troubles, very much loved by her family. Her niece, Veronica, ten years younger than Lisa, thought her aunt was as lovely as a princess.

“She was young and beautiful,” Veronica remembered, “gifted, loving, and funny. I thought she was so cool. She was killed when I was nine. And she was supposed to come pick me up right before she was murdered. She had promised me a winter picnic in the park and I was looking forward to that for such a long time.”

Lisa had been shuttled around from home to home for much of her young life. She lived for a long time with her sister’s family, and Veronica thought of Lisa more as an older sister than an aunt.

After that, Lisa lived by her wits.

24

FRANK ADAMSON was shocked to learn he would be the next commander of the Green River Task Force. Sheriff Vern Thomas told him that he would be reporting directly to him. That was fine with Adamson, and it would have made Kraske’s job a lot easier if he’d had the same direct line of communication.

With seventeen years on the department, Adamson had worked in almost every unit in the King County Sheriff’s Office, although he had such a quiet mien that a lot of his fellow officers didn’t realize it. When Adamson became the lieutenant in charge of Special Investigations in Major Crimes, Lieutenant Frank Chase was in charge of Homicide in the unit. Chase had a remarkable memory for names and faces, and he was amazed when he realized how long Adamson had been on the department. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” he demanded.

Adamson only grinned. He looked a little like Bob Newhart, only with much darker hair, and he had a similar sense of humor and low-key approach to problems. His outward appearance was always relaxed, no matter what might be churning beneath the surface. He was one of the smartest cops in the department and one of the best liked, managing even to head the Internal Investigations Unit without making enemies. In that position, Adamson knew a lot of in-house secrets about various officers, and was fully aware of the rumors that said the Green River Killer was a police officer.

It was from Internal Investigations that he was summoned to the new task force. Adamson was, however, a contradiction—a cop who was an intellectual and whose wife, Jo, was a playwright. Adamson loved the poems of Dylan Thomas and Theodore Roethke; he was a policeman who had once intended to be an attorney. Although he often walked away from crime scenes depressed by man’s inhumanity to man and the blind unfairness of tragedy, only Jo knew it. Adamson maintained a calm and capable facade.

While most wives might moan at the thought of their husbands stepping into the powder keg that was the Green River investigation, Jo Adamson was pleased. She believed in her husband, and she herself was seething at the injustice dealt out to the victims. “I’m a feminist,” she told reporter Mike Barber of the Post-Intelligencer, “not a radical, but I get so angry at these women being killed. What it says about our culture—a man out there killing for his own perverted purpose.”

The Adamsons lived in Maple Valley in a deep woods, and that helped smooth the edges of death and disaster that are cops’ frequent companions. They had a good marriage and they admired each other’s talents. Jo had had her plays produced and Frank was very proud of her. She was impressed with the honesty that was at his core. They had a teenage son, a number of big and fluffy cats, and collectors’ eyes for chiming clocks and wonderful sculpture. Like Kraske, Adamson, who was forty-one in 1983, had once been a marine.

As the guard changed and an enthusiastic Adamson stepped in to run the task force, success seemed possible within months. He had forty detectives now, eight times what the first task force had, and they moved out of the dingy space between floors in the King County Courthouse to more spacious quarters in the Burien Precinct area, closer to the crime scene sites.

This new task force also had a lot more money. Captain Mike Nault, who now oversaw the Major Crimes Unit, had given a figure to the new sheriff and the command force of how much money he thought the Green River investigation merited, and the powers that be doubled it. They now seemed to be in a win-win situation.

Adamson accepted that his team had to begin by playing catch-up, reevaluating the information gleaned in the first eighteen months and moving forward. And as in any battle, the commander and the troops who now came to the front were fresh and confident. Those who were pulled back were battle weary. Dave Reichert, Bob LaMoria, Ben Colwell, Rupe Lettich, and Fae Brooks stayed with the fight. Adamson knew all too well that he, too, would have to deal with the media. The headlines were growing larger and the coverage of the Green River murders more frequent as the list of possible victims expanded.

“I honestly thought,” Adamson remembered, “that because I had good people, we would have this thing solved within six months. In hindsight, I think we probably should have.”

The second Green River Task Force had one senior deputy prosecutor assigned to work on the cases with them. Al Matthews joined the investigation in early 1984. He would remain with them until 1987.

WHEN ADAMSON moved into his new job during the holiday season of 1983, Shawnda Summers, Yvonne Antosh, Connie Naon, Kelly Ware, Mary Bridget Meehan, and an unidentified body had been found. Many, many more women were missing, some of them victims who had yet to be reported.

Five days before Christmas, 1983, Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s mother learned where her daughter was. And Frank Adamson had to deal with the first body found on his watch. It wasn’t really a body; it was only a skull.

“We had a list of twelve women who were victims—known victims—and not all of them would turn out to be Green River victims,” Adamson recalled. “Then there was a list of missing women sent to us from the Seattle Police Department with twenty-two possibles on it. Most of them would be found and were, indeed, Green River cases. I was in Major Crimes only fifteen days when Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found in Mountain View Cemetery. She was one of those twenty-two, and she was one of the youngest of all. She was barely sixteen. That was shocking to me.”

The small skull in the cemetery was found about eighteen miles southeast of the airport. It might well have been from the cemetery, a body unearthed by grave robbers and scattered. Vandals in cemeteries had struck often in the south county. The site was almost on the boundary line of the small town of Auburn. But it wasn’t a skull ripped from a grave. It was Kimi-Kai, found thirty miles from where she was last seen in downtown Seattle. It was out in the open, not in an overgrown wooded area where the other victims had been found.