Dana’s husband, however, followed the minister’s edicts absolutely, and she didn’t seem to mind. She did what he said. He and Dana had moved to a little house in Burien, and they were fixing it up. Dana chose a pretty shade of blue to paint the bathroom, but he forbade it. “It’s going to be white,” he said firmly. “Everything in here has to be white.”

And it was.

Dana’s mother-in-law was almost her exact opposite. Mary was a salesperson in the Men’s Department at the JCPenney store in Renton. She was a brunette in her late forties and always impeccably dressed with perfect accessories. Friends described her as “very well put together.” She took great pride in her managerial position in the JCPenney hierarchy.

Dana’s mother-in-law bought all of her husband’s clothes, just as she did for her sons. She always knew ahead of time about Penney’s sales and also used her employee discount. Although it rankled Dana, it only made sense for Mary to buy her husband’s clothing.

Mary didn’t approve of Dana, either. Her housekeeping wasn’t up to Mary’s standards, and she felt her daughter-in-law didn’t take very good care of Chad. He was a frail boy with reddish blond hair who always seemed to have a runny nose. He had inherited his father’s allergies and had to take medication for that, and he was so full of energy that he never put on any fat.

Dana wanted to have another baby, but her husband didn’t. As much as he loved Chad, he didn’t think they could afford to raise two children. He wanted Dana to have her tubes tied.

As the years passed Dana gained even more weight and she was miserable about that. Her husband didn’t complain much, but she knew he would like her to be slimmer. Finally, she broached the subject of having gastric bypass surgery. In the late seventies, it was a new procedure, almost experimental. But Dana wanted it, and finally he encouraged her to go ahead with the operation.

The gastric surgery worked spectacularly well—maybe too well. Within months, Dana went from plus sizes to a size 7. She had never worn clothes that small. She suddenly became a very attractive woman and men did double takes when they saw her. It made her husband a little nervous. He had never worried that she would leave him, but now she had a lot of men noticing her. “Guys started to come on to Dana,” Maryann said, “and she’d never had that happen before.

“Dana was working in Penney’s, too. Her mother-in-law got her the job. Even though they had their issues, Dana and her husband were always over there, visiting, and her mother-in-law babysat for Chad a lot.”

By this time Dana and her family had moved again. They had lived in three or four houses in the south end of King County, while the Hepburns stayed put. Their new place was on Star Lake Road. Like the Maple Valley Heights house, it was in a very secluded area, down at the dead end of a road.

During one of their shared meals—at the house on Star Lake Road—their hosts disappeared after dinner, leaving Maryann and her husband, Gil, in the house with the children. Their guests cleared the table and waited. It was quite a while before Dana walked in with a funny grin on her face. She pulled Maryann inside and whispered, “Bet you can’t guess what we just did?”

When her friend looked mystified, Dana laughed and told her that she and her husband had gone outside and made love—he liked it that way. Maryann thought privately that it wasn’t a very polite thing for the host and hostess to do, but she let it go. Dana was so happy with her new figure that she seemed years younger than she was, almost like she was having a delayed teenage time.

Both couples enjoyed country-western music and liked to go to a spot called The Beanery on the East Valley Highway near Kent. When Dana’s husband had to work nights, Gil Hepburn would drive Maryann, Dana, and a mutual friend, Diane, to the country-western bar.

“That’s when things started to go downhill in Dana’s marriage,” Maryann said. “Gil would dance with all three of us, and we had a good time at first. But then Dana started slipping out the back with some guy. She always told her husband that she was staying overnight at Diane’s house because it was too late to come home alone while he was working.”

It blew up when Dana’s husband called Diane’s house one night, asking for his wife. Told she wasn’t there—that she had never spent the night at Diane’s house—he was stunned. His comfortable, overweight wife who had done what Pastor ordained and wanted only to keep house and be a mother had turned into a femme fatale. When her baffled husband questioned her, Dana said that Diane was lying, that it was Gil who was cheating on Maryann, and they were all trying to cover it up. Dana also spent time at the Eagles’ Lodge, often coming home well after 2 AM, worrying her husband more.

By this time, Dana’s gastric bypass was working more than it was meant to. She wasn’t getting enough nutrients to survive and her weight plummeted. She had no choice but to have her alimentary canal reconnected. If she didn’t, she would die. Now her husband insisted that she have her tubes tied while she was under the anesthesia and she agreed. One child was enough.

But the marriage was destroyed. The man who had never fit in anywhere now had two wives who had betrayed him, and he couldn’t forgive either one of them. By the spring of 1981, their divorce was final. He would pay Dana child support, and have custody of Chad on weekends and some vacations. He resented giving Dana his hard-earned money. It made him furious.

He had come up in the world in his jobs and in buying more and more expensive houses, but he kept striking out with women. Prostitutes were easier than trying to pick up women and ask them for dates.

28

FROM THE BEGINNING of his stint as the Green River Task Force commander, Captain Frank Adamson acknowledged that he wasn’t a veteran homicide investigator. If there were people who could enhance the task force’s effectiveness with their expertise, he wanted to invite them on board. Bob Keppel was borrowed back from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Keppel, with his “Ted” Task Force experience and his ability to organize diverse information, could be both an important expediter and a somewhat cold critic. So be it.

The F.B.I. sent Gerald “Duke” Dietrich, who was a humorous and deceptively easygoing special agent in the San Francisco office of the Bureau. Dietrich was an expert on child abductions and homicide. He had once actually wired a tombstone with a tape recorder to trap the sexual ravings of a necrophile. He and his former partner, Special Agent Mary Ellen O’Toole, had an enviable record of crime solving in California.

Adamson also contacted Chuck Wright, a Washington State Probation and Parole supervisor. Wright taught courses at Seattle University on violent offenders and sexual deviancy. Adamson was looking for someone inside the probation system who would be able to quickly evaluate suspects—who were now euphemistically called, “persons of interest.” Many of the men the task force was looking at had prior records. Wright’s background would be of tremendous help in searching the system for sexual offenders, and he could work with Adamson and Dr. Chris Harris, a forensic psychiatrist, as one more mind to try to understand the killer they were looking for.

Sheriff Vern Thomas asked Amos Reed, then head of the Department of Corrections, if the task force could “borrow” Chuck Wright to act as a liaison. Reed said, “Of course.”

“The first thing I saw on Frank Adamson’s bookshelf was the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” Wright remembered. “I had never seen a police officer who had that ‘cookbook’ to use as a tool—and not only did Adamson have it, he’d read it. We were both readers and we hit it off right away.”