Betty Pat Gatliff was a forensic sculptor in Oklahoma. Along with a handful of forensic anthropologists and artists, Betty Pat’s forte was to put faces on skulls where there was no flesh left. It sounds like a grisly kind of artistry, and it wasn’t something I ever thought I could watch, much less do. I’d met Betty Pat once at a forensic science conference where I was presenting a seminar on Ted Bundy, and she called me when she came to Seattle. She invited me to join her at Dr. Don Reay’s medical examiner’s headquarters, which was then at Harborview, our county hospital facility. A little reluctantly, I accepted. At the M.E.’s office, I looked at the four boxes that held the numbered bones of the unknown victims as she selected a skull. I reminded myself that these bones had once been young women who deserved to have their identity known and to have funeral services and a decent burial or cremation.

Betty Pat began with the skull from the remains found in September 1983, beside the Star Lake Road. It had been steam cleaned and sterilized. Trying to see it through Betty Pat’s eyes, I realized that all skulls don’t look alike. There were many individual characteristics. The high cheekbones on this one suggested an American Indian heritage.

Betty Pat showed me how she attached erasers from ordinary pencils to the face portion. She’d found that thickness matched the skin and underlying tissue of most subjects. Then she began to add claylike “flesh” to bring out the features. Of course, if the person had been very fat or very thin, this method might not be accurate, but there was no way to tell because we didn’t know whose face we were trying to bring back.

Carefully patting on clay, Betty Pat filled in the space between the erasers, and someone’s face did emerge. When she was satisfied, she added dark brown glass eyes, eyebrows, and a dark wig.

We stood back, wondering. Who are you?

But this was not an infallible means of identification. It’s impossible to know how much soft tissue—lips or the tip of a nose—was once there. Gender and racial characteristics can usually be determined by jaws and foreheads and teeth, so it’s easier to know what color hair and eyes to add, but not always.

Had this woman plucked her eyebrows? What about makeup and the length of her hair? Was it straight or curly? Forensic artist Frank Bender of Philadelphia says he “talks” to the skulls he works on and gets a remarkable sense of who they were and what they looked like. Betty Pat Gatliff relied more on bone structure.

Although we didn’t know it then, we were working on Gail Mathews—whose lover had seen her riding in the old truck with a stranger, and she looked right through him. She must have been very frightened not to call for help. Her clay face was calm now, and inscrutable.

When I looked at a photograph of Gail later, I saw that she had inordinately large lips, as if she had overdone collagen injections. But they didn’t use collagen cosmetically in 1983; hers were naturally lush, so full that there would have been no way for us to recreate her real face.

Gail had not been the only victim left near the Star Lake Road. On March 31, 1984, six months after her remains were discovered there, a mushroom hunter moved through the shadowy trees along the ravine and came upon a human skull on the east side of the road. He backed out of the woods and called the King County Sheriff. Within a short time, Frank Adamson had gathered his crew of detectives and Explorer scouts. This was another very, very difficult region to search. The man who had left so many bodies seemed to prefer steep inclines, and this was one of the steepest. Maybe it was easier for him to roll his victims down the hill, away from prying eyes. If he was, indeed, the guy seen in several different trucks, he might even have had some kind of winch or step that helped him lower the victims from the back of his pickup. But his plan wasn’t perfect. The trees had caught the dead girls and kept them from plunging all the way down.

It was to be an endlessly weary day for Adamson, hampered as he was by reporters who kept trying to go into the woods and look for evidence or even more bodies. The last thing he needed was a bunch of media types messing up any evidence at this site.

It didn’t take long to find the remainder of the skeleton that went with the skull. But as the search progressed, the task force investigators discovered two more skeletons farther down the slope. And then more. Trees nearest each body site were sprayed with orange paint so that they had some kind of center point for triangulation measurements. Detectives marked the trees nearest to the remains: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

This would turn out to be one of the killer’s favorite places to rid himself of the women he no longer wanted. As the crow flies, it was less than a mile from the Green River, where the first five of his victims had been found.

The woods themselves, usually silent except for the distant rushing sound of Mill Creek at the bottom of the ravine, seemed quite remote. But the site was close to Pac HiWay, although 272nd was considerably south of where the Strip ended. To the east, Smith Brothers’ Dairy had dozens of milk trucks coming and going, and young families were building houses along 55th South and Star Lake Road. It would have been difficult for the killer to bring a body here in the daytime. After dark, it was possible that no one had ever seen him.

All weekend long, reporters lit on Adamson like mosquitos. At the time, he had no media spokesman to deflect questions, and everywhere he turned he stumbled over another reporter. He was a man who was seldom impatient or moody, but this was a bad two days. By the time he got back to task force headquarters, Cookie Hunt was waiting for him, having dogged his steps at Star Lake Road. “Cookie was so pushy,” Adamson said. “When I went back to my office, I had 128 phone calls and messages, and I had had it. I found her very antagonizing that day.”

He was exhausted. They all were. Officially, they now had twenty bodies. Adamson suspected that this was only the tip of the iceberg. When Dr. Don Reay and Bill Haglund let him know the identities of the latest victims located, it was clear that the killer was working with a kind of maniacal organization. As Pierce Brooks had suspected, the GRK obviously had his private dumping sites waiting before he went out to kill.

First, he’d used the Green River, and then the deserted blocks around the airport, then Highway 410 near Enumclaw and the mountain foothills off Highway 18, and finally Star Lake. There might be even more cluster sites.

The Star Lake Road victims were identified as Terry Rene Milligan, gone from the Strip on August 28, 1982—found on April 1, 1984; Delores Williams, missing from the Strip on March 8, 1983—found on March 31, 1984; Sandra Kay Gabbert, missing from the Strip on April 17, 1983—found on April 1, 1984.

(And when they finally identified Gail Mathews, they would realize that she was taken from Pac HiWay only five days after Sand-e Gabbert disappeared. Perhaps something had spooked the killer, and he had to drop Gail’s body too close to the road. That would explain why she was found first. But no one knew it was Gail until she was positively identified in February 1985, almost two years later.)

The fourth body found off Star Lake Road was identified in the third week of April by Bill Haglund in the medical examiner’s office, using dental records. She was Alma Ann Smith, the quiet, lonely girl who once went to seventh grade in Walla Walla. She had gone off to Seattle so many times because her father lived near there, bouncing from one parent to the other.

They did not find Marie Malvar or Keli Kay McGinness who had also disappeared in the spring of 1983.

THE GREEN RIVER MURDERER was becoming almost legendary, a fictional character not unlike Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street or Jason in the Friday the 13th series, current movies that teenagers flocked to watch as a cast of young actors fell victim to a stealthy killer who cuts them away from the crowd one by one and then murders them. But what was deliciously scary on the movie screen was bleak and ugly in real life.