Going back to the first serial killer he himself ever hunted, albeit in a time when even he didn’t use the term, Brooks thought of Harvey Glatman, the so-called Lonely Hearts Killer. Glatman was a homely man with big ears who lived in a cheap apartment in Los Angeles. He didn’t appeal to the women he met through a Lonely Hearts club, and he’d killed one who rejected his advance and only wanted to go home. After that, he had lured victims in Los Angeles by pretending to be a professional photographer. He took photos of his naive victims, some where they were tied up and gagged, telling them he was shooting covers for fact-detective magazines. But then he drove the helpless young women to the desert where he strangled them, lingering afterward to shoot more pictures.
Glatman had taught Pierce Brooks a lot about murderers like the Green River Killer. “I don’t believe this killer selected the body disposal sites at random,” Brooks told Vern Thomas, Frank Adamson, and Bob Keppel. “If he did, he is the luckiest serial murderer of all time. He knows pretty well, or even exactly, where he will dispose of the victims before the murders occur.
“Just for the moment, let’s focus on four of the most prominent cluster sites: airport north, airport south, Star Lake, and the Green River. They are heavily wooded, somewhat concealed, and you think at first that this is an ideal location where someone would take anything to hide it—a body in this particular case—anything valuable. In this case, it was the body that was valuable.”
Brooks knew what he was talking about. He explained that the bodies of the victims, and the killer’s relationship to them, was what gave him power. He needed the secrecy and the knowledge that only he knew where the poor dead girls waited for him.
“It is a very high risk situation,” he continued, “to go into an unknown area that is heavily wooded without knowing something about the location. I just do not believe that the killer went there with his victim the first time he had ever been there. I try to put myself in his position. Here I am a stranger in the area. If I want to dispose of a body and I’m driving down a nice, little winding hill and I have this body I want to get rid of, that would probably be the last place I would stop.”
A stranger wouldn’t know what was at the bottom of the hill, who might be approaching, or, in the case of an illegal trash dumping spot, if someone might drive up and catch him. No, he would have to be very familiar with where he went with a body. The Green River site—the first site—would have been especially iffy for someone unfamiliar with it. There were the fishermen along its banks, and local residents taking a shortcut home.
Brooks was positive that the killer either lived or worked nearby. He knew that stretch of river like he knew the back of his hand. He urged the task force detectives to learn who lived there, worked near there on a permanent basis, had worked there on a temporary project. Since the Green River victims had disappeared at various times of day and night, he suggested they check unions for work schedules, cab companies for their drivers’ locations and shifts, military records from the many bases around Seattle and Tacoma.
“I have always felt this person might either be in the military or have been in the military,” Brooks said. More than any psychic, and most detectives and F.B.I. special agents, Brooks could draw a picture in his mind, a profile of the serial killer they all hunted. He was quite sure that it was only one killer, working alone.
“The odds are that it would be a Caucasian—good chance that he is military, or had a military connection, is an outdoors type, is somewhat of a loner but is certainly not a total introvert. I can’t believe that a person that picks up prostitutes on the street is the kind of person who walks into some kind of singles bar and tries to make it with some of the girls. I think this fella’s a little bit backward that way, does not come on strong—that’s why he goes for prostitutes, which, in my thinking, are the easiest victims.”
Brooks speculated that the GRK might be a trained killer, taught that arcane skill in the service. “In other words, he could be a trained survivalist, knows how to kill and kill quickly. He is not a mutilator, has no interest in that. His sexual gratification is just with the kill.”
Two men working together? Brooks said it was possible. It had happened before. Two men would explain how heavy bodies could have been carried so far up and down hills and into deep woods.
Even in the most organized investigation, Brooks pointed out that most of the serial killers captured were caught on a fluke. They had been stopped because of a traffic violation or because their cars had some defective equipment, and only then had patrol officers done Wants and Warrants checks and realized they had hooked a very big fish.
Frank Adamson and his team didn’t care how they caught the GRK, just so long as they did.
29
IN THE SPRING OF 1984, the reports of missing women slowed to a trickle and then seemed to stop completely. There was the cautious sense that perhaps the Green River Killer’s torrent of murder was over. Now, the thrust of the probe changed. It was as if he had divided his contest with detectives into two parts: the murder phase and the body recovery phase. Up until mid-March, the task force had found only fourteen of the missing.
In February and March, a new cluster site surfaced, and an earlier disposal area yielded another body fragment. On February 19, a partial human jawbone was discovered in the Mountain View Cemetery in Auburn, near where Kimi-Kai Pitsor’s skull was found. It was not immediately tied to the identity of any of the victims.
On March 31, 1984, a man and his son were hiking when they came across the skeletal remains of a female in an entirely new location, far from the airport and Star Lake. This site was on Highway 410, twelve miles east of the town of Enumclaw and about thirty miles southeast of the SeaTac Strip. The topography and vegetation along 410, however, were typical of lightly populated areas in western Washington: fir forests, thick underbrush, isolated. Ironically, the White River coursed nearby.
The connection to the Green River investigation seemed remote to Frank Adamson. It was so far from the places where other victims had been left, and animals had dragged away most of the bones. There weren’t even enough to make a positive identification. Every body found in Washington’s forests couldn’t be a GRK victim. Still, the bones were saved, and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts would be brought in to sweep the area for additional evidence.
More surprising were the discoveries east of Seattle. The newest site was located on the way to Snoqualmie Pass, the mountain summit where fifteen-year-old Carrie Rois had been taken by the stranger in the truck. But Carrie, missing now, had come back safely from that trip. On Valentine’s Day, an army private who was part of a convoy to the Yakima Firing Range was using a rest stop in a heavily treed area when he came across a skeleton. It rested below a cliff at the base of Mount Washington. The site was close to Change Creek, a few miles east of the hamlet of North Bend off Exit 38 on the I-90 Freeway. I-90 connected Seattle and the coast to eastern Washington. Sheriff’s personnel and Explorer Search and Rescue scouts combed the area, also known as Homestead Valley Road, for anything that might help identify the female skeleton.
Bill Haglund, chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, tried to match the Valentine’s Day victim’s distinctive teeth, which had a wide gap between two upper front teeth, to the dental charts the M.E.’s office had on file without success.