Dave Reichert, who had been with the task force continually for the longest time—almost two full years—probably felt the brunt of their derision the most. It was difficult to keep going when so many leads evaporated into nothing, where sure bets as suspects were cleared of any connection to the Green River cases and walked away.

“What we are finding out,” Reichert said, “is that police departments aren’t organized to handle a case like this. It’s not dealt with that often.”

That was true enough. But Seattle now had two almost back-to-back serial killing sieges. First, Ted Bundy—and now the Green River Killer. Frank Adamson’s task force reorganized, giving specific detectives responsibility for certain victims: Dave Reichert would be in charge of the investigations in the deaths of Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Leann Wilcox. Jim Doyon and Ben Colwell would work the cases of Carol Christensen, Kimi-Kai Pitsor, Yvonne Antosh, and the woman known only as Bones #2. Rich Battle and Paul Smith handled the murders of Giselle Lovvorn, Shawnda Summers, and Bones #8. Jerry Alexander and Ty Hughes traced the movements and people connected to Mary Bridget Meehan, Connie Naon, and Bones #6.

Those, of course, were only the victims whose remains had been found. Sergeant Bob Andrews, called “Grizzly” by his fellow detectives, would work missing persons with Randy Mullinax, Matt Haney, and Tom Jensen. Rupe Lettich would do follow-up on all homicide cases, but there was still a huge job left—the outpouring of tips and suspect names coming in willy-nilly from the public. Cheri Luxa, Rob Bardsley, Mike Hatch, and Bob LaMoria would try to field those and pass them on to the most likely investigators.

Until the day when, hopefully, a suspect would be identified, arrested, and convicted, the public would have no idea of how desperately hard they all worked, pounding pavements, making tens of thousands of phone calls, talking to people who told the truth, those who shaded the truth to suit themselves, and others who outright lied to them. It was akin to crocheting an elaborate tapestry as big as a football field, inserting each tiny stitch as new information began to match old intelligence.

All the while never knowing what centerpiece—whose face—was going to emerge in the middle of the tapestry.

THEY DID IT ALL without complaining and seemingly without letting their critics get under their skins. But sometimes the jeers got to be too much. Women shouting that the new Green River Task Force wasn’t even trying annoyed Lieutenant Danny Nolan because, if anyone knew how hard they were trying, it was Nolan. He had a poker face and a wry sense of humor.

But he didn’t find the Women’s Coalition humorous. Their sit-ins and marches interrupted the order of business for the task force, which already had enough problems. Cookie Hunt, a short, heavy-set woman who was blind in one eye, was one of the most stubborn critics. She organized an all-night sit-in outside task force headquarters, then housed in what had once been an elementary school. Cookie was so earnest in her crusade and so guileless that it was easier to feel sorry for her than to take offense. But she, too, was fighting the wrong target.

Nobody thought Cookie was a prostitute; she was just trying to help them. I used to offer her rides when I spotted her standing in the rain on the highway. She would grudgingly accept only because she knew I was friendly with the detectives and wrote positive things about them.

Frank Adamson worried about Cookie, too. He took criticism more philosophically than his crew did. On one windy, stormy, pounding-rain night, he couldn’t stand to watch the picketers walking in the cold rain. So he invited them in and told them they could demonstrate inside, and sleep in the hallway. They accepted. Some of the other task force detectives wondered how Danny Nolan was going to react to the sight of the “libbers” when he came to work in the morning.

“I’ll tell you how,” Adamson said with a grin. “He’ll walk in, take one look, and he won’t say a word. Watch.”

He knew his lieutenant. Nolan spotted the hallway full of sleeping demonstrators, marched past the first office in line, which was Adamson’s, into his own office next door, and slammed the door. A few minutes later, he came back to Adamson, fuming, and said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The detectives watching doubled over with laughter. They had to when they could; there was little to laugh at.

Five days after the coalition’s march, Reichert’s and Keppel’s prediction came to pass; the homicides were continuing, and the Green River Killer took another victim. Cindy Smith was seventeen, but she looked younger. If Keli McGinness had resembled Lana Turner, Cindy Smith looked more like Punky Brewster. All the missing girls were individuals, all attractive, but such different types. And all so young.

 

CINDY SMITH had left home and was living in California, much to the concern of her mother, Joan Mackie. Joan was relieved when Cindy called in the middle of March 1984 to say that she was coming home. She was engaged and she was happy and wanted to come back to her family. Joan sent her money for transportation and was delighted to see Cindy. “She didn’t even unpack her suitcase,” her mother recalled. “She was in such a hurry to go see her brother.”

It was the first day of spring, March 21, when Cindy disappeared. She had been heading for her brother’s job, and the last time anyone saw her, she was at the corner of Pacific HiWay South and S. 200th Street. Ironically, she had come all the way from California to meet her killer on her first day back home.

Cindy was white. As far as the task force investigators could tell, there were twenty white girls missing and fourteen black girls. By April 20, 1984, they had discovered a total of four sets of unidentifiable bones, and, without a full skull and jaw, they couldn’t be sure whether those were the final remains of Caucasian or African-American victims. They didn’t even know if they had found all of the Green River victims. There were a number of names on the Green River Victim/Missing Person List that had an asterisk next to them, signifying “Not on Official List.” Quite likely, there were names that should have been reported and never were.

Every expert on this “new” kind of murderer said that they don’t stop killing of their own accord. Serial killers don’t quit. But something must have changed in the GRK’s life, making him less hungry for murder or causing his rituals to become more difficult. Maybe he had less privacy. Maybe he was happy, which seemed unlikely.

In truth, he might have been running a little scared. Although the investigators didn’t yet realize it, he had already walked into one of the snares they’d set on Pac HiWay, and been questioned by Detective Randy Mullinax, who had worked this daunting serial murder investigation almost from the beginning. Mullinax had noticed how often he was on the highway and the way his eyes followed the girls on the street. He took his information, wrote out a field investigation report (F.I.R.), and let him go. He was only one face among so many and he hadn’t appeared to be a viable suspect. The man admitted he liked paying for sex, but he had a solid work record, a local address, and he hardly seemed the type.

The quiet man wasn’t really that concerned about being stopped. He figured the cop wouldn’t remember him. Actually, he was wrong. Mullinax’s antennae had gone up and he recalled that stop well, although he couldn’t really say why. Just a longtime cop’s “hinky” feeling.

Indeed, the confident man would be stopped again, admitting this time to Detective Larry Gross that he patronized prostitutes, but he seemed to be a totally nonthreatening type, just another guy in a plaid flannel shirt and a baseball cap, a blue-collar working stiff, single.