She even had a sketch artist draw a picture of how she pictured the killer in her mind. She recalled that his car was “souped-up.” She said she’d reached speeds of sixty miles an hour herself as she tried to catch his car, but he’d taken the curves like a professional driver. Where this driving feat took place is the question. Anyone driving that fast on Frager Road would surely have ended up in the river itself. The roads leading up the hill had such tight curves that nobody could go that fast without crashing.

Barbara Kubik-Patten announced that the Green River Killer was an “absolute genius” at getting rid of bodies, and she felt he had had some kind of special training that allowed him to outsmart the police crime lab. She also felt that the skeleton she found and that of Amina Agisheff held physical evidence that would allow the detectives to catch him.

Kubik-Patten believed she had vindicated herself, and she continued to show up at crime scenes and scan newspaper pictures of the victims so she could keep “in touch” with them more tightly.

This had been a compelling series of murders in terms of sheer numbers, and it was rapidly becoming more weird.

31

HE WAS ENJOYING the media coverage. He loved the attention, having been underrated all his life by most people, including his parents.

By the early eighties, he had been cuckolded by two wives—both “the skinny blonde and the fat brunette,” even though he had joked about changing his luck by choosing different types of women to court. He had learned about prostitutes when he was in the service, but they had also betrayed him by giving him a venereal disease. As one acquaintance described him later, “He didn’t seem like the sharpest knife in the drawer,” but he had learned a lot about social interaction. And he still had a robust sex drive, which required female partners. He’d been taught that masturbation was shameful.

He found a gold mine in an organization for divorced people with children, and he mined it skillfully. He dated a dozen or more women he met there. Darla Bryse* initially believed that meeting her new boyfriend at Parents Without Partners was serendipitous. In many ways, her life experiences were quite similar to the Green River Killer’s victims, just as they were much like those of his other girlfriends in PWP. She had suffered abuse and betrayal, but something in her still wanted to trust.

Born in Santa Rosa, California, to a housewife and a gas station owner–cum–construction worker, she remembered her childhood as being both loveless and frightening. “I was the oldest, and I knew I had two sisters,” she said, “but one went away. That’s about the only thing I remember before I was in first grade. My parents adopted my younger sister out to distant relatives.”

Although one of her grandmothers lived with them, Darla did most of the cooking and housework. Her parents had an active social life, belonging to lodges and clubs. They drank a good deal and had little time for parenting. “A man who was married to one of my mother’s friends abused me physically—sexually—and emotionally when I was very young,” Darla said. “I think my mother knew about it, but she never did anything.”

Darla never felt that she had much control over her life, although she acted out by being tough and starting a teenage gang. “I actually put razor blades in my hair,” she admitted. “But I was really just looking for someplace to belong, I think.”

Her first child was a boy, born out of wedlock. He was given to relatives. Darla wasn’t yet twenty when she married her first husband, Jimmy.* She was very much in love with him, and was thrilled when they married in January. She got pregnant right away and gave birth to a girl in October. She had another son within the following year. “I didn’t want to get pregnant again so soon,” she said. “I had two little kids under two and I had this compulsion about keeping my house absolutely clean, but Jimmy got drunk on Christmas Eve and even though I begged him not to, he just about raped me. And I knew right away that I’d be pregnant. I was.”

Darla couldn’t cope with three babies. When her baby son started screaming relentlessly one evening, she fought back a compulsion to throw him at the fireplace. “It was just luck that Jimmy came home early from work. I felt like I was out of my mind.”

She was suffering from postpartum depression, but it wasn’t an emotional disorder easily recognized in the sixties. Jimmy had her locked up in a state hospital for three months and quietly filed for divorce. “I was so naive and so dumb,” Darla recalled. “I didn’t want a divorce—I loved him—and I didn’t even know enough to get a lawyer. We were still going out once in a while and I thought we would be getting back together. And then my dad came to me and showed me a legal paper. Jimmy had been to court, and I didn’t even know that the divorce had gone that far. Jimmy got the house, the kids, everything….”

Jimmy began to date another woman and Darla couldn’t bear seeing them together. She left Santa Rosa and moved to Seattle with her sister. She was a very good-looking young woman and she got a job easily—as a dancer in a lesbian bar in the basement of the Smith Tower in Seattle’s Pioneer Square area. At that point in her life, she didn’t care about much of anything. “I learned about ‘Christmas trees’—dexadrine and blackberry flips,” she said of her introduction to drugs. “There was a gal who worked in the bar who got a crush on me, but I told her I wasn’t into that.”

Darla still missed Jimmy, and she went back to Santa Rosa as often as she could to visit her children, hoping that they could get back together. He seemed glad to see her and offered to rent an apartment for her. She visited her children, and sat by the phone in her apartment, waiting for Jimmy to come by. They were intimate again, and she believed that he still loved her. “I got pregnant again,” she remembered, shaking her head sadly. “I thought he’d be happy when I told him, but he said, ‘It’s not mine.’ And it was his. I hadn’t been with anyone but him.”

All of her life, Darla had been looking for love. Her ex-husband’s cruel response to what she thought would be joyful news threw her into the worst despair she had ever known. “I took Seconal and everything I could find that I’d bought over-the-counter, and I passed out, unconscious. I should have died, but my mother ran in unexpectedly. She was going to Mass and women had to cover their heads back then. She came to borrow a scarf from me, and she found me. And so my life was saved, and I was still pregnant. I thank God for that, now, because that baby girl is so important to me in my life.”

Because she had attempted suicide, Darla was once more committed to a state hospital. When she was finally released, she moved in with women friends, avoiding men for almost eight years. She had decided to put her baby girl up for adoption, feeling that she wasn’t an adequate mother. “But my best friend talked me out of it,” she said. “And we raised her together. I’m so grateful that I didn’t let Libby* go—she means the world to me.”

Darla moved back to Washington State and worked for the state and for public utility companies. She was an employment counselor for a while, and then an Avon Lady.

On her own again in her early thirties, Darla opted to have a tubal ligation. She had given birth to five children, and all but one were being raised by someone else. She wanted to date men again and she feared more pregnancies. Her sterilization gave her freedom she’d never had, and she went through a period of promiscuity. “I was drinking too much then, and I think I wanted to prove that I could satisfy a man, and I found that I could, even though I never had an orgasm myself. For the first time in my life, I was in charge in my relationships. It gave me a kind of power over men. I looked good, and they would just melt around me.”