Jeffrey, with his apparently stable family life, seemed to be a natural for rehab. He had been declared a treatable sexual psychopath and sent to the mental hospital rather than to prison. He participated in the approved treatment in the sexual offenders program: group therapy.
However, when Jeffrey was released and deemed a responsible citizen, he set about proving that group therapy had done little, if anything, to change his deeply ingrained patterns. It had only whetted his appetite. For more than two years, he entered apartments and houses in the East Hill section of Kent. Women woke up in the wee hours of the morning to find a man looming over their beds with a nylon stocking pulled over his face, making a grotesque mask that hid his real features. Some estimates placed his toll at over one hundred rapes. He used a knife to threaten the already terrified women into submission, and afterward he asked for their money and jewelry.
Sometimes he carried a camera with a time-release shutter so he could take pictures of himself and his victims during his sexual attacks. He also had a beeper to alert him when he was needed back at the motel where he worked.
Finally captured, Jeffrey pleaded guilty to seventeen counts of rape, burglary, and kidnapping in King County Superior Court. Becky Roe, long head of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Sexual Assault Unit, recommended that he receive two consecutive life sentences. “I don’t think violent sex offenders are treatable,” she said succinctly.
Douglas Jeffrey had prowled in the town where the first Green River victims were found. He had the kind of benign look about him that would have made young women trust him. Could he be a killer as well as a relentless rapist? Possibly, but he was eventually dropped as a Green River suspect.
In the summer of 1983, a nineteen-year-old man, enlisted a friend, twenty, to help him kill his own mother. The woman, thirty-nine, was choked to death in the back of the battered van they lived in. Her son later admitted to detectives that they had also killed four women in the south part of King County, and he even described areas where they had left their bodies. He said he hated women, beginning with his mother. But then he recanted his confessions about murdering teenage girls. Both men were sentenced to long prison terms, and subsequently removed from the Green River possibles.
It was very difficult not to be enthusiastic about suspects who seemed a perfect fit. I fell into that trap myself any number of times. A few years into the Green River investigation, I received several letters from a man who lived in Washington, D.C. He was an attorney there. I verified that. He hinted that he had the answers to what had happened to all the murdered women, and he said he would send me tapes that would convince me.
But then he told me that he had played a large part in the Watergate scandal and that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward depended upon him for information. Upon hearing that, I began to doubt his veracity, if not his sanity. It was too pat.
When the tapes arrived, they consisted of hour after hour of my tipster’s personal witnessing of an arcane cult that he said abducted women from the trick sites so they could be sacrificed. He had hidden in the shadows, he said, as he watched hooded people strangling young women in the light of a huge bonfire. The area he described was similar to the woods where many of the victims’ remains had been found, but woods and forests could be found in any direction beyond the Seattle city limits. My “expert” knew many of the victims’ names, and their physical descriptions were correct, but that information had been in the newspapers. He was so obsessed that I felt he had gone from his “Watergate” fantasy to a “Green River” fantasy.
And then I bought a copy of All the President’s Men, and, sure enough, my correspondent had been a key player in the authors’ contacts with Deep Throat. The man’s name was unusual, and I was able to validate that he was who he said he was, that he lived where he said he did—in a Washington suburb—and that he currently held a position of some responsibility. I supposed he might be telling the truth about both newsworthy investigations, but I was more inclined to think that Watergate had unhinged him.
Just to be sure I wasn’t looking away from truly important information, I took the “cult sacrifice tapes” to Dave Reichert and told him what I knew about the man who sent them. I let the informant know that his revelations were now in the proper hands, which he approved. And then I moved on. If the information was good, Reichert would deal with it. I never heard back from him. If he didn’t have time to listen to hours and hours of someone rambling on about cults and human sacrifice, I can’t say I blamed him.
One of my more insistent callers was a woman who lived in the south county area. She was certain that her estranged husband was the Green River Killer. I had heard from scores of women who were under the same impression about their ex-husbands, but this woman was relentless. Although it wasn’t generally known, Marie Malvar’s driver’s license had been found at the SeaTac Airport weeks after she disappeared. Either she had lost it there herself, her purse had been stolen, or her abductor had wanted to make it look as though she had willingly flown away from her boyfriend and family.
The woman who called, named Sonya,* was fixated on the Green River cases, just as she was convinced that a major American retail corporation was spying on her. The latter seemed to me to be a paranoid delusion. In the Green River cases, she was particularly focused on Marie Malvar. That, too, could be part of a fantasy world. She was so frightened that she moved constantly, leaving me a different phone number every time she called.
“I went with my husband to the airport to see his mother and father off at the B gates,” Sonya said breathlessly. “My husband pulled some cards out of what I thought was my wallet. I grabbed what I thought was my driver’s license, but when I looked at it, it wasn’t mine. There was a picture of a girl in her twenties with long dark hair. It had four names on it, but all I could see was the last name that started out ‘Mal’ before he snatched it back. He gave it to our baby to play with, but after his folks left, he reached for it and realized that the baby had dropped it. He was frantic looking for it on the floor, but they told us we had to leave the terminal because they were locking the doors.”
Marie’s license had been found near Gate B-4 at the airport by Michael Meadows, a maintenance worker for American Building Maintenance (ABM) while he was vacuuming on May 27, 1983, and he turned it in to Lost and Found, who then gave it to the Green River Task Force. But Sonya insisted that the airport had lost it and the task force didn’t know about it. Eventually, she went on the Internet and hooked up with a self-styled female private eye in Texas who had also logged on to a chat room where the Green River murders were discussed constantly.
It was the kind of case that attracted wannabe detectives. Everyone in Seattle seemed to have a theory, but the prevailing rumor was still the one that said the Green River Killer was a cop. Four of the names people gave me as “absolutely, surely, the GRK” were detectives I had known for years. After a while, if I thought about it enough, I could almost begin to wonder if I had ever really known them.
They had ex-wives, too, and two different women called about two different cops they’d been married to once. One even said coyly, “Ann, you know him. You’ve had lunch with him.”
That was a little creepy, but I’d had lunch with hundreds of detectives over the years. I hated the guessing games, and I was grateful when the officers’ names were cleared.
No forensic technique was considered too strange to try in the search to identify either the victims or the killer himself. Some of the detectives were open to listening to psychics. Dowsers (who seek water in the ground with a forked stick) were encouraged to try to locate bodies, and a number of informants had been hypnotized to see if their unconscious minds would bring forth more specific information.