Most of the time, all majors and above in the sheriff’s office were too busy with administrative duties to actually go out in the field, but each was required to perform “Command Duty” every few months. “I’d go out and check in with various precincts, respond to what was going on out in the county. And I used these times to drive by three guys’ places,” Adamson said. He wasn’t sure what he might see, and he really didn’t think he was going to be lucky enough to find them doing something incriminating just as he drove by, but he felt compelled to check on them.

One of Adamson’s prime suspects was an older man a young prostitute had reported as a very peculiar “client.” She had agreed to meet the man at a motel on the highway, and he was quite a bit older than the usual johns. He’d seemed nice enough at first. He’d even taken her to the House of Values and told her she could buy whatever clothes she wanted. Then he took her to his house, which was close to the Green River. He owned a good-size property with many acres of land and a barn.

But once the man—Ingmar Rasmussen*—took the girl into his house, he refused to take her back to the highway. He kept her there for a week, showing her a special police badge. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He proudly showed her his barn. With a sinking feeling, she saw that one area of the walls was plastered with pictures of women. He took pictures of her, too. She wondered if they were going to end up on the wall. Worse, she wondered where she might end up.

Rasmussen obviously was well off, and he didn’t really hurt her, but she felt trapped because she was his prisoner. Finally, he took her back to the motel where she had met him. When she told detectives about the rich man with the barn full of female photographs, it sounded as if she had only an overactive imagination. However, she was able to lead the detectives back to Rasmussen’s spread of land and point out the big house and barn set in the Green River valley.

In a ruse to take a look inside, Captain Bob Evans once drove alone to Rasmussen’s place in an unmarked white Cadillac. He knocked on the door and when Rasmussen opened it, Evans said his car had broken down. The wealthy farmer was arrested on charges of suspicion of unlawful confinement and a search warrant was obtained for his property.

The task force investigators saw that there was a round door in the barn ceiling, held in place with big spikes. They swarmed over the barn, wondering what arcane discoveries they might make. But they were to be disappointed. “We didn’t find any pictures there,” Adamson said, “although we did find one of Rasmussen’s cameras, and when the film was developed, our informant’s pictures were there.”

If this had been a horror movie, Ingmar Rasmussen’s isolated barn would have been the ideal place for a serial killer to hide his victims. But this was the real world, and he, like so many others, was removed from the suspect list.

He was a little kinky, all right, and he had taken young prostitutes to his barn for photo sessions. A private investigator a worried Rasmussen had hired told Adamson that the pictures had been in the barn all along, even during their search, but the old man had taken them down from the barn wall and put them in a drawer.

“We’d gotten very good at outdoor crime scenes,” Adamson said wryly, “but we were rusty on working indoor scenes, and we’d missed the photos.”

25

WHILE THE CONSERVATIVE CITIZENS of south King County tended to blame the business of prostitution and vice for the shadow over their lives, they didn’t really care to become involved. Responding to their complaints, King County executive Randy Revelle called a meeting in the Tukwila City Hall. Ironically, although Revelle, Sheriff Vern Thomas, and Captain Frank Adamson showed up to answer questions and listen to concerns, only four townspeople attended. The leaders of the probe and a gaggle of reporters were present, but nobody else seemed to care.

One person asked if the sheriff’s office thought the killer would strike again, and Frank Adamson answered an unequivocal “Yes.”

The Green River Killer had no reason to stop killing. As far as the detectives knew, he hadn’t even come close to being caught, and he must, indeed, be enjoying his “success.” Historically, serial killers don’t stop—they accelerate. Unless such murderers are arrested and incarcerated for other crimes or they become physically unable to stalk victims or they die, they keep going. In the rare case, a radical life change—marriage or divorce or severe illness—can call a halt to their obsession to destroy lives.

So, of course, the man they were looking for was going to kill again. And they were afraid it was going to be soon. They were right.

 

MARY EXZETTA WEST vanished from the Rainier Valley neighborhood on February 6, 1984. She had a sweet face and a shy smile. She lived with her aunt and she was always thoughtful about coming home on time. She had left her aunt’s house at midmorning that Monday. In exactly a month, Mary would have turned seventeen, but she didn’t make it that far. In six months, she would have given birth to a baby, but very few people knew that she was pregnant. She didn’t know what she was going to do when she began to show.

It was odd that so many of the GRK’s victims were killed so close to their birthdays. He couldn’t have known when they were born, not if he was picking them up as they happened to cross his path when he was in his killing mode. It had to be only grim coincidence.

IT HAD BEEN twenty months and the victim toll kept rising. Many people were anxious and restless, including the man himself, although the men and women who were looking for him didn’t know that. Women’s Libbers were stridently blaming the Green River Task Force and law enforcement in general for failing to really try to protect them by not catching the Green River Killer.

The GRK was not strident at all; he merely wanted to up the ante a little and make the tournament of terror more interesting.

On February 20, Post-Intelligencer reporter Mike Barber, who had written extensively about the Green River cases, had a letter routed to him from the City Desk. It had arrived in a small, plain white envelope with a Seattle postmark.

The typewritten address was incorrect:

Seattle postintelligencer

fairview n john

PO Box 70

Seattle WA 98111

Actually, the street address belonged to the Seattle Times, but somehow the letter got to the P.I. The sender had added “very inportent” to the envelope.

Barber read the message inside, which had no spaces at all between the words, and at first, it seemed incomprehensible. He looked at it several times to see what the “code” might be, if, indeed, there was a code. And it still made little sense.

Gradually, he began to draw diagonal lines between what might be words and the information became clearer, although the writer was either uneducated or striving to appear so.

whatyou eedtonoaboutthegreenriverman

dontthrowway

I first onebokenordislocatarmwhy

2oneblackinriverhadastoneinthevaginawhy

3whysomeinriversomeabovegroundsomeunderground

4insurancewhogotit

5whosetogainbytheredeaths

6truckdisoutofstatefatherhadpaintedorinriver

7somehadfingeralscutoff

8hehadsexaftertheydeadhesmokes

9hechewsgum