If the killer was reading the newspapers and watching television—and the task force was almost positive he was—he was probably smiling; he was now being compared to John Gacy, Wayne Williams, and Ted Bundy in terms of body counts. And he was leading the pack.

Indeed, there were so many girls missing now, and so many who had been found, that I caught myself referring to them by their number in terms of the sequence of their disappearances. I was horrified when that dawned on me. I never wanted to do that again, so I stayed up all night with a large piece of construction paper, newspapers, scissors, and cellophane tape. I attached their pictures to the chart, and then wrote their names, descriptions, the date they went missing, and the date they had been found. Too many of them still had a blank space in the last category. But I had memorized their names and faces, and they would be forever imprinted on my mind as real human beings, not just numbers.

FRANK ADAMSON, the reader of poetry, knew T. S. Eliot’s work well, and he realized that April 1984 was, indeed, “the cruelest month,” at least in terms of the number of women’s bodies that were being discovered.

Barbara Kubik-Patten, who truly felt that she was getting messages from the dead girls telling her where fellow victims could be found, sensed that Mary Bridget, Kimi-Kai, Opal, and a blond girl she couldn’t identify were talking to her, and she was extremely frustrated that the task force detectives wouldn’t pay attention to her. The only investigator who had the patience to listen to her was Jim Doyon, whom Frank Adamson termed “a sweet guy.”

On April 15, 1984, Kubik-Patten tracked me down where I was having Sunday dinner at a friend’s house. I’d left the phone number on my answering machine in case my kids needed me. Like most of the task force detectives, I was growing weary of her insistence that she had psychic visions but that nobody would listen to her.

Impatient that she had interrupted my rare dinner out, I finally said, “You know, Barbara, your visions are too vague. I think you’re going to have to actually find a body yourself in order to convince them. Most detectives aren’t that impressed with psychics.”

I knew that she had been showing up at body sites and getting in the way of the investigative teams that were trying to gather evidence while they staved off the press and curious bystanders. On one occasion, Kubik-Patten and a woman friend had bulldozed their way into the woods near a body site search. They found the remains of an animal, which they believed was human, and poked at it. Unfortunately, they aroused a nest of yellow jackets. Her friend, who was allergic to bees, was stung and they had to flee in disarray.

The Wednesday after Kubik-Patten called me, a shovel operator on a crew of loggers found human bones in a deep woods owned by the Weyerhaeuser Company. They were scattered in a fifty-square-foot area off the north end of Highway 18, near North Bend, and in an area where two victims had been located two months earlier.

Dental records and the discovery of a mandible (lower jaw) brought quick identification. The bones were those of Amina Agisheff, thirty-seven, who had been waiting for a bus in downtown Seattle and was the first woman on the missing list. It was a surprising answer to the many questions about her disappearance. She had been the devoted mother of three children, someone never involved in prostitution.

Even though Amina’s remains were found close to earlier skeletons, her relatives could not believe that she fit the Green River victim profile, and neither did the detectives. She was too old, for one thing, and she had never been anything but a loving and responsible mother to her children. Her ethnic background was Russian, and she was part of an extended family who were always in touch with one another. Born in New York, schooled in Paris, she was a Montessori teacher and a waitress at the Old World Delicatessen in Ballard, the Scandinavian bastion in Seattle, far, far away from the SeaTac Strip. The thought that she might have been involved with prostitution was unfathomable to anyone who knew her. Whoever killed Amina may well have climbed on board the Green River Killer’s bandwagon deliberately.

Barbara Kubik-Patten, accompanied by her two youngest children, hurried to the area near North Bend the next noon. Barred by the yellow tape that marked off Wednesday’s search site, she entered the woods at a very similar spot a third of a mile away—also a gravel turnout from Highway 18—and began to search. She would say later that it was the voice of Kimi-Kai Pitsor that had told her to go there.

And she found a body.

Kubik-Patten rushed to where detectives were still processing the site where Amina Agisheff’s scattered skeleton had been found. She approached Rupe Lettich, one of the investigators who did not believe in her otherworldly messages, and tugged on his sleeve. He shooed her away, telling her she wasn’t supposed to wander onto the area being searched. She kept trying to get his attention, but Lettich had heard her cry wolf too many times. It wasn’t until Frank Adamson drove up that she found someone who would listen. He knew that she had searched for an entry into the woods that would match the Agisheff site. “She had to go quite a ways into a copse of alder trees from the pullout to find the body,” Adamson remembered. “The remains were covered with a green plastic garbage bag, and there were other bones of animals there. It was rather remarkable that she did find it.”

With Kubik-Patten’s discovery of this unknown victim on April 19, 1984, a strange coincidence, the investigation became even more inscrutable. The skeleton under the green garbage bag was not easily identified, and she became known, pathetically, as Bones #14. It was a long time before she would be identified as twenty-two-year-old Tina Marie Thompson. She was more streetwise than many of the girls who had been abducted, had brown hair and brown eyes, and looked a great deal like comedienne Carol Burnett. She had been tall and very slim.

 

BUT THERE WERE two Tinas. This Tina was not Tina Tomson aka Kim Nelson aka Star, the blond girl missing from the SeaTac Strip since the previous Halloween. She was still missing. Tina Marie Thompson had disappeared on July 26, 1983, and hadn’t been reported missing for some time.

Could the killer possibly have known that he had killed two young women whose names were so much alike? Probably not.

But still…

I had to admit to being chagrined that Kubik-Patten had actually found a body four days after I’d told her that that was what it was going to take to give her credibility with the Green River Task Force, never dreaming she would actually find one. It almost made me wonder if she had any guilty knowledge of the murders. The investigators must have felt the same way. They gave her a polygraph test, and she passed. They also reasoned that it wasn’t that amazing that she had stumbled across a victim. She had gone to the very next turnout where someone could pull off the road, and these turnouts were convenient for the killer; he had used them a lot. It might very well have been that deductive reasoning rather than ghostly voices had led her to pick a spot to search.

For several days, Barbara Kubik-Patten made headlines in Seattle papers, something she appeared to want for the previous two years. She explained to Mike Barber of the Post-Intelligencer that she had seen the Green River Killer twice.

Her first encounter had been, of course, at the Green River itself, where she saw the white car racing away. Now, almost two years later, she was able to give Barber a more precise description. She said she had heard a scream near the river and she and a male friend, whom she did not name, had seen the tall killer, but only in profile, as he walked across a clearing and got into a car. “He’s white,” she said firmly, “has brown hair, thin legs, and I’m not sure of his age, but he walks with a long stride—with long, slow-swinging arms.”