Early in 1982, he called Darla to say he’d bought himself a house in Des Moines, close to Pac HiWay. It was a small rambler. He was very proud of it, and he invited Darla and one of her girlfriends to a big housewarming party he was having. He’d also asked people he worked with and other PWP members.
“When we got there,” Darla said, “he had refreshments laid out and his house was all cleaned up. But no one else came to his party. I felt sorry for him, and we stayed and tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, but I could see he was hurt. He showed us through his house and his backyard. I remember there were two big fir trees out in his backyard. Every time I drove on I-5 after that, I could spot his house by looking up at those trees.” She recalled his backyard ended in a bank that dropped to the shoulder of I-5, the interstate freeway. The roar of the constant traffic on the freeway sounded like an ocean in a storm.
The only time Darla ever saw him show any anger was after their breakup. When his housewarming celebration was such a debacle, he invited her and Libby to dinner. She asked if Libby could bring a girlfriend, and he said that was okay. “Libby was just in her teens and you know how silly girls can be at that age,” Darla recalled. “For some reason she and her girlfriend got the giggles at the dinner table. I told them to settle down because he had gone to a lot of trouble to fix dinner for us, but they just had to look at each other and they giggled harder.
“Well, he got furious. He really lost it. I’d never seen him even get a little angry before. I don’t know if he thought they were laughing at him or what, but he shouted at them. He scared Libby. And we never went back to his house after that.”
It wasn’t long after that unfortunate dinner that Darla’s ex started dating another woman from PWP—Trish Long.* Darla heard a rumor about six months later that he had contracted the herpes virus and she considered herself lucky to have avoided that. Even so, she remembered him as a nice guy and wished him well. She had made some mistakes in her life, but she didn’t consider him to be one of them. Within five years, Darla met a man she would marry. She didn’t expect that she would hear much about her old boyfriend after 1981. They had begun to move in different worlds.
32
IN MID-MAY 1984, there was a respite for the task force, and for the women who strolled the highway, always looking over their shoulders, always asking johns, “Are you sure you’re not the Green River Killer?” And those who asked should have known he wouldn’t tell them the truth, if he was.
At least, no new disappearances had been reported, but that didn’t mean much. Frank Adamson had feared that the Green River Killer might continue his pattern of numerous abductions and murders in April through October, and the task force detectives girded up for more trouble, even as they kept the Pro-Active Team on the highway with decoys and vigilance. The silence made all of them nervous. Where was their “warm weather killer”?
Parents who had waited for some word of their missing daughters lived anxious day by anxious day, tensing every time their phones rang. Almost a year had gone by since Judy DeLeone’s co-worker was absolutely sure that he had seen her daughter, Carrie Rois, alive and well at Seward Park in Seattle. She had even come up to him and said, “Remember me? I’m Carrie—and you work with my mom.”
Judy sank so deeply into depression that Randy Mullinax and Linda Barker, president of Friends and Families of Victims of Violent Crime, a support group active in the Seattle area for more than a decade, called Mertie Winston, whose daughter Tracy had been missing since the previous September. They suggested that the two women talk. Linda was afraid that Judy was suicidal.
“I didn’t know what I could do,” Mertie remembered, “but I agreed to call her. I began by saying ‘I don’t know what to say to you.’ We ended up talking for three straight hours. I’d been baking cookies when Linda called and asked me to call Judy. I ended up burning at least three batches of cookies because Judy and I got so involved in talking. We were among the few people who could understand what all the parents were going through. Judy and I began to bolster each other up. We came to a place where we believed our daughters were together, that whatever had become of one had happened to the other. You search for ways to be optimistic, and we told ourselves that both Carrie and Tracy were alive and that they were okay and they would be coming home again.”
ON MAY 7, 1984, the Green River Task Force investigated the murder of a thirty-eight-year-old woman named Kathy Arita whose body was found near Lake Fenwick. The location was right—she was only a half mile or so from the Green River—but nothing else matched. She was a Boeing employee, missing for three days, and the mother of a seventeen-year-old son. Her body was fully clothed when she was found. She was quickly eliminated as a Green River Killer victim. There would be a number of other women killed in the same general area over the years ahead, each to be investigated as a possible GRK case. However, they proved to be unconnected, part of a predictable homicide rate in Seattle and King County—normal. No, no one can call any murder normal.
While the violence against the SeaTac Strip teenagers seemed to be, at the very least, on hiatus, there were serial rapists and killers active in other areas, and task force investigators from King County traveled all over the United States to confer with detectives in other jurisdictions: Anchorage, Alaska (where baker Robert Hansen admitted to killing seventeen women over the previous decade, hunting some of them with his bow and arrow. Human beings were only “game” to him); in Los Angeles, a freelance television cameraman, once a suspect in four rapes in Seattle, was charged with three California slayings.
Every time a spate of serial murders of women erupted—and they seemed to be increasing in the U.S.—the Green River detectives wondered if it might be their man who had moved on. If he had, he had left much tragedy behind to be discovered. On May 9, the M.E.’s head investigator, Bill Haglund, confirmed that the bones found near Enumclaw off Highway 410 were those of Debora May Abernathy, the transplant from Waco, Texas, who would never have willingly left her little boy behind.
Oddly, a man walking near the intersection of Highway 18 and State Route 167, many miles away from where Debora’s body was left, found her Texas driver’s license about ten feet off the shoulder of the road. Detectives who searched the area three months later discovered her son’s birth certificate. Her killer had either accidentally or deliberately flung her documents from his vehicle. It was more likely that he did it on purpose to rid himself of any connection to the corpse he had hidden in the wilderness.
When her mother was notified that Debora was dead, she commented sadly, “She used to be a real nice girl.”
I REMEMBER being interviewed about the Green River Killer and serial murderers in general by a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle that May of 1984. I wasn’t in Seattle; I was in Eugene, Oregon, attending Diane Downs’s trial for the murder of one of her children and attempted murders of two others. I saved the resultant article by Susan Sward and Edward Iwata because it included coverage of the Green River murders—the first time, really, that anyone in the media outside Seattle acknowledged that they were occurring. That newspaper is yellowed and crackling dry now, its edges crumbling as I fold it out.