In the mideighties, I was as confident as Frank Adamson and Dave Reichert were that it was merely a question of how many months it would take to make an arrest, and I often made predictions off the top of my head, assuring the audience that I believed he would be caught by Easter or Thanksgiving…or surely by the next Christmas.
And I believed it myself, never really thinking that the man who was so elusive might be sitting in a darkened auditorium, listening.
26
WHEN THE LETTER sent to Mike Barber was revealed, I took a crack at being a cryptographer. There is no question in my own mind that it was written by the real Green River Killer, obviously a man who knew many secret things but who had extremely limited grammar or spelling ability:
Translated by author:
What you need to know about the Green River man
Don’t throw away.
First one broken or dislocated arm. Why?
One black in river had a stone in the vagina. Why?
Why some in river? Some aboveground? Some underground?
Insurance. Who got it?
Who set [stood] to [gain] by their deaths?
Truck is out of state. Father had painted [it] or [it’s] in [the] river.
Some had fingernails cut off.
He had sex after they [were] dead. He smokes.
He chews gum.
[There is a] chance the first one blackmailed him.
You work [for] me or nobody.
[I] think he changed his M.O.
Businessman or salesman.
Car and motel reservation.
Man seen [carrying] big luggage out of motel. [It] was heavy [and he] needed help. Keys [and] I.D. card [are at] Road 18.
Where so close some ring and miscellaneous?
Out of state cop.
[I] don’t kill in no one area. Look in [and] outside.
One had old scars.
Mom [or one] Maple [Valley] had red wine Lombrosco, some fish dumped there.
Any drugs or selling?
Head found. Who found it? Where is the rest?
When did [they] die? Day or night?
What tore their mouths, or is it a trick?
Why take some clothes and leave [the] rest?
The Killer wears at least one ring.
Real estate man is one man.
Long haul truck driver last seen with one.
Some had rope marks on neck and hands.
One black in river had odor on only.
All strangled but with different methods.
One black in river had worked for Metro.
Most had pimps betting them.
Escort modeling forced them off fear of death.
Maybe pimp had—or got—back at them.
(Sic) Who finds the bones? What are they there for?
Man with gun or knife.
Someone paid to kill one. The others are [to] hide it.
Killed [because of] who they are. Or is it [because of] what they are?
Any dead different than [the] rest?
It could [be] a man [from] Portland. [Or] someone [who] worked there.
What kind of man is this?
There was a book left at Denney’s sign. Not this. Out of [doors.] It belongs to [a] cop.
Maybe the GRK wasn’t out there in my audiences very often. Maybe he actually resided a long way away. Although those of us in the south King County area still tended to believe that we lived in safe small towns—Des Moines, Riverton, Tukwila, Federal Way, Burien—our world had changed. In 1984, the SeaTac International Airport was known as the Jackson International Airport in honor of Senator Henry Jackson, and in the course of a year ten million people flew in and out of it. A quarter of a million people drove friends, families, and business associates to their flights or picked them up. If the Highline School District, which encompassed my children’s schools, were to incorporate as one city, it would be the fourth largest in the state of Washington.
Schuyler Ingle, a reporter for the Seattle Weekly with superior researching skills, looked at those figures and realized that 150,000 people passed through the Strip area in a month. Transients, yes, but from every class of society, both very rich and very poor and everything in between. They stayed in 4,500 motel rooms or slept wherever they could.
Lieutenant Jackson Beard headed the Pro-Active Team for the new task force. There were plainclothes officers on the Strip most nights. Female police officers dressed and made-up to look like prostitutes strolled beside the road at least one night a week. Male officers tried to keep an eye on them, waiting for the signal that a john had taken the bait. The Strip had become an uncomfortable place for both the real prostitutes and their customers, who would have to figure out a way to tell their wives and/or girlfriends why they’d been arrested.
Sooner or later, the task force detectives were sure they would catch the Green River Killer in their net. If he was still out there, he was going to approach the wrong woman. The Pro-Active Team’s decoys were concentrating far more on arresting and questioning the johns than the girls who made a meager living on the street.
But if they stopped the right john, how would they know it was him? They didn’t know that yet—unless he gave enough of himself away for them to get a search warrant for his house or his car. Unless he’d kept souvenirs of his victims, or photographs. Unless the science of DNA progressed to a point far beyond where it was in 1984.
He was out there. But as far as they knew, he wasn’t one of the dozens of men they arrested for propositioning the disguised police officers.
In mid-March 1984, he probably watched with some satisfaction as a group of women who called themselves the Women’s Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders mobilized. They planned to march to “take back the night,” and to point up their perception of the inadequacy of the Green River Task Force. They were joined by a San Francisco group called U.S. Prostitutes Collective.
“We are calling on all women to end the farce of the Green River murder investigation,” Melissa Adams of the coalition said in a news conference. “It is the responsibility of all of us to take action, and we must do it now—because women are dying.”
Men would not be allowed to march in the downtown Seattle parade that would begin at the Pike Place Market, proceed along First Avenue to University, up Third Avenue, and end at Prefontaine Square next to the King County Courthouse. However, they would be encouraged to watch and show support. The local chapter of the National Organization for Women and various domestic abuse and child abuse groups were supporting the coalition.
Two actual prostitutes were to be imported for the rally, one from San Francisco and one from London, women who would stand in for local working girls who were too frightened or embarrassed to be singled out for the crowd. It was two decades ago, and a different era. Women’s Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. “The issue is the killing of women,” Adams said. “But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer—and victims of a sexist society.
“Violence against women is an All-American sport.”
Perhaps it was. Certainly, even though the millennium has arrived, far too many women are still being sacrificed to domestic violence. But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn’t the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man who was killing young women far more, if possible, than the women who marched with banners that disparaged them. To have their overtime efforts and their near-pulverizing frustration called “a farce” was a bitter pill, although they had grown used to being undermined.