She was to be known simply as Bones #8. Medical examiner Dr. Don Reay determined that the woman, who had brown hair, was Caucasian, and in her late twenties or early thirties. Her arms and her lower leg bones were missing, probably dragged off by animals. Reay estimated that she had been of medium height. She had been dead for three to six months.

That was all the information Reay released. He was trying, as everyone on the task force was, to hold back as much information as possible to eliminate compulsive confessors. The less specific information the general public knew, the better, although they also had to be warned of the danger. It was a double-edged sword.

A month later, on March 13, 1984, another skeleton surfaced three hundred yards away, her hands and part of one arm missing. A man looking for moss to sell to florists stumbled upon it. Again, searchers swarmed over the area, combing the underbrush in a one-mile section on either side of a now little-used stretch of old I-90. They found a pair of women’s panties in the general region, but they couldn’t be sure they were connected to the skeleton, which had lain there for from two to four months.

Bill Haglund was able to identify this second woman. It was Lisa Lorraine Yates—Lisa, who had promised her niece she would come to take her on a picnic soon. She had been one of the last girls to vanish—two days before Christmas, three months before her remains were found.

This site in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains was quite a way away from both the SeaTac Strip and Aurora Avenue North. Mount Si (also known as “Twin Peaks” after the popular television series) rose like a behemoth with fir forests climbing to glistening white snowbanks at the peaks’ very tops. Nearby, the new freeway buzzed with traffic, much of it made up of huge trucks, rigs from all over the United States. Most drivers pulled off at Exit 34 for a hearty meal at Ken’s Truck Stop, where they could take a shower, check into a motel, or even doze in the sleeper sections of their cabs. Ken’s was a trucker’s paradise, and the food was so good that most regular travelers stopped there, too. Camp Waskowitz, where fifth and sixth grade students from Highline public schools camped, was also close by.

What if the Green River Killer was a long-haul trucker? He wouldn’t be the first serial killer who was, an ideal job for a man who wanted to avoid detection by ridding himself of his victims in isolated areas. That was one of the suggestions the anonymous letter writer had sent to Mike Barber of the P.I.

The new cluster opened up more possibilities. Frank Adamson ordered a thorough and tedious search between the South Fork of the Snoqualmie River and the very steep ridge that lay to the south. The searchers gleaned nothing of interest.

There were two easy ways to reach the North Bend site. One was by going east on I-90 from Seattle, across the first Floating Bridge, and the other was by traveling northeasterly along Highway 18, a much more isolated stretch of road that formed the hypotenuse of a triangle of roads from just north of Tacoma to Auburn, Kent, and Maple Valley, ending a few miles west of North Bend. It was mostly a two-lane road with some passing lanes and turnouts, and forests creeping almost up to the road itself. The two newly discovered bodies were at the eastern terminus of Highway 18. Was there a geographical “plan” in a stealthy killer’s mind? Would there be more body cluster sites that might hook up to form a pattern? Only time would tell.

SEVERAL BODIES had been found south of the SeaTac Airport, and also just north of the runways. The next discoveries were also north of the airport, and closer to the ground zero corner of the Pac HiWay and S. 144th.

It was the first day of spring, March 21, 1984. Cindy Smith had just gone missing in Seattle, although her disappearance hadn’t been reported yet. Bob Van Dyke, the caretaker of three baseball fields at 16th Avenue South and S. 146th, was clearing brush in preparation for the upcoming season when his Labrador retriever came running up to him with a bone in his mouth.

“I knew what it was, but I hoped that it wasn’t,” Van Dyke said.

It was a human hip bone. Van Dyke called the Port of Seattle Police because the baseball fields were in their jurisdiction, and they called the Green River Task Force. Lieutenant Jackson Beard was at the scene as soon as he could gather detectives and Explorer scouts. A necrosearch dog led them first to a copse of pine trees one hundred feet beyond one field’s fence. There was a human skeleton there. It was that of a young female, and she was destined to be Bones #10.

The search that followed was the largest so far in the Green River investigation; sixty Explorer scouts walked shoulder to shoulder over several square blocks. Lieutenant Danny Nolan joined Beard to coordinate the searchers’ efforts.

The next day, Chris Clifford, a dog handler, and his blood-hound—appropriately named Sorrow—located another body in the same area. Sorrow was an enthusiastic search dog who was more skilled at necrosearch than at finding living people. Dogs trained to find people seem to be good at either live searches or dead searches but not both—a trait that can be easily determined when they are only puppies. Discovering a corpse wasn’t a victory for either Clifford or Sorrow, however.

“These hunts are real depressing,” Clifford said. “And not very rewarding. Sorrow had this funny reaction, too. Like ‘Hey, this isn’t fun.’ When he finds something that’s dead, he gets real tentative. He just stops. I came around the corner and saw him just standing there, frozen.”

Sorrow had found Cheryl Lee Wims, eighteen, missing from downtown Seattle for exactly ten months to the day.

AS SAD AS the body discoveries were, Captain Frank Adamson’s task force felt they were closing in on the man who had destroyed lives so heedlessly. Surely, with the recovery of eighteen victims’ remains, something was going to break. As the investigators searched the area slightly west of the airport, they felt they were only hours from finding some piece of physical evidence that would lead them to him.

And yet, as I write this, it is exactly twenty years later. Twenty years, and I never write a book until a case, or a series of cases, has been adjudicated. Never has there been a homicidal mystery that had so many dead ends and mazes.

The headlines in the newspaper clippings I have saved about the discoveries of March 1984 are ironic, given the precipitous plunge of Howard Dean as a Democratic shoo-in in March 2004. It was an election year two decades ago, too, and the political commentators were just as anxious to jump to conclusions about the coming election, even though they knew that much in life can change so rapidly: “No Doubt Now: Hart is the Man to Beat—Gary Hart is the obvious leader for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination!” (United Press International).

Despite their high hopes, Howard Dean’s and Gary Hart’s nominations were not to be, and neither was the imminent capture of the Green River Killer.

30

THE TASK FORCE had now looked at, and cleared, thousands of suspects: all of the A’s, B’s, and many of the C’s. They had concluded that there was no shortage of dangerous, or peculiar, men in south King County in 1984.

A Kent motel manager named Douglas Jeffrey had a criminal record stemming from a rape conviction thirteen years earlier that his employers didn’t even know about. A good-looking man with a wife and child, he had a great smile and a winning manner. It was the philosophy of the seventies and early eighties that sex offenders could be treated at Western State Hospital, rehabilitated, and released into society without using drastic measures like chemical or surgical castration.